LIVE AND BE YOUNG 



Other Books by the Author 



Woman 

Carnival of Destiny 
Diplomatic Mysteries 
Eat and Grow Thin 
The Ego Book 
French Portraits 
Mouse-coloured Road 
Drink 

Spinners of Life 
Take It From Me 
Verse: The Night Watchman 
and Other Poems 



LIVE 
AND BE YOUNG 

BY 
VANCE THOMPSON 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1920 




©CU601531 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



NOV I I 1920 



TO 
DR. CHARLES L. THOMPSON 

OF NEW YORK 

Bellus homo es, my dear father, 
acfestivus — so to whose eternal 
youth should I dedicate this 
little book, if not to yours? And 
the day is the 18th of August, 
1920, precisely eighty-one years 
after you came into this world 
to make it better— and younger. 

V.T. 

Rome, 1920 



Nemo nisi a seipso Ixditur 





CONTENTS 




The Beginning of the Book . . . 


PAGE 

xi 


CHAPTER 
I. 


Youth 


3 


II. 


Really Young People . . . 


14 


III. 


The Enemies of Youth . . 


29 


IV. 


The Elixir of Youth . 


45 


V. 


Physical Youth 


56 


VI. 


Emotional and Mental Youth 


77 


VII. 


Classifications of Character . 


98 


VIII. 


Types of Humanity .... 


120 


IX. 


Applying the Rules— How to 






Live and Be young . . . 


139 



IX 



THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK 

THIS is not a preface — it is where the 
book begins. 

And it is a book for normal people — 
with normal bodies and normal ideas 

It is frank and practical as a railway- 
guide for its purpose is to show you how 
to travel a definite road and arrive at a 
definite goal. What it is to do for you is 
to show you how to live and be young — 
to carry youthfulness on with you as you 
traverse the years. 

A normal thing; there is nothing mi- 
raculous about it; many people discovered 
it in the past — perhaps by chance or per- 
haps because they had an instinct for 
doing the right thing. To-day, thanks to 
science, we know where we are. 

We can check the disintegration which 

xi 



THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK 

is old age because we have ascertained 
precisely what it is. 

Therefore in showing you how to live 
and be young I need not, at any moment, 
part company with scientific facts and the 
common sense of science. 

That is clear, is it not? 

I do not mean that I can waft you 
back to childhood or adolescence. You 
wouldn't want to go back there anyway; 
no sane person would. A child is a diges- 
tive tube — you wouldn't want to revert 
to that; and an adolescent is a lung — you 
wouldn't really care to howl and gallop 
with adolescence; but that the normal 
woman can carry her youthfulness with 
her as she goes her way in life is as certain 
as the sun; the normal woman and the 
normal man 

So there you are. 

What modern science and the old com- 
monsense can give you is a practical way 
of getting the best out of life, while at 

xii 



THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK 

the same time you maintain a static 
condition of youthfulness. 

One word more: 

Humanity falls apart into certain 
groups; it is made up of various types 
which I have set down in this book. Now 
according to the type to which you belong 
will be the kind of life that will keep the 
youth-giving vibrations at their proper 
pitch. 

Of just what your type is you should 
be the best judge — if not, you may know 
someone who has thought it worth while 
to study your character — at all events, 
you will find it in this book. 

Vance Thompson. 



Xlll 



LIVE AND BE YOUNG 



LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

CHAPTER I 

Youth 

THERE is nothing so splendid as 
youth; there is nothing else worth 

while 

The fox who lost his tail (in the fable) 
tried to make a bare rump fashionable, 
but not for a moment did he succeed 
in fooling the happy foxes whose red 
brushes were still waving astern. Even 
so there has been a great deal of writing 
and preaching, by people who have lost 
their youth, about the dignity and beauty 
of age, but have the writers and preachers 
convinced any one? Have they convinced 
you or me or themselves that there is any- 
thing better than youth? 



4 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Old age is not dignified. King Lear, 
if you please, was tragic, but he was any- 
thing but dignified. Indeed the reason 
you are sorry for King Lear is because he 
is old — ridiculous. He put on old age 
like a garment and strutted round in it 
until he was ridiculous in the eyes of his 
daughters and everyone else — except a 
professional fool. And the tragedy of 
King Lear is the tragedy of being, pro- 
fessionally, old. 

Why be old? 

Especially when, in addition to being 
unpleasant, it makes one absurd. 

Occasionally, often, you meet someone 
made up for the part of an old man: he 
wears a long black coat and a long gray 
beard— because he thinks they make him 
look like a prophet; and whether you see 
him on the bench or in the pulpit, or 
spoiling the landscape, the best you have 
for him is a little pity and the smile that 
comes in spite of you. If you are honest 



YOUTH 5 

with yourself you will have to admit that 
old things — the motorcar that makes an 
avowal of its age, the old shoe, and the 
rose fame — impress you as being both sad 
and absurd. 

And the point of all this is plain as a 
pike-staff: Instinctively you recognize 
that old things are not normal — there 
is something grotesque and freakish about 
them. They are unnatural. They are 
out of harmony. They should not be. 

Now what is old age? 

In a word, it is fatigue. 

Old age is physical fatigue and emo- 
tional fatigue and mental fatigue, that 
is why it is — like everything else that is 
monstrously out of proportion — ridicu- 
lous. The "One-hoss Shay" was never 
ridiculous; it carried on in a well-balanced 
condition of youthfulness until the final 
smash-up; and all it needed at any time 
in its career was paint and polish to keep 
it in the smart set. It carried on — al- 



6 y LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

together, that historic shay; it was pro- 
portionate. And the same thing is true 
of man or woman. 

A fatigued brain in a young-going body 
means discord — and the madhouse. Kit- 
tenish emotions in a fatigued body — well, 
you know what they are; the old girl with 
babyish ways; all of which is ghastly 
because it is abnormal. You must have 
proportion; and if you insist on being old, 
for heaven's sake see to it that your mind 
and your emotions are just as tired as 
your body is. 

I am going to tell you about this fatigue 
which is old age — this fatigue which 
shakes the human shay to pieces — and 
tell you, withal, how you can live and be 
young in spite of it, if you will follow the 
rules of the game; but here, for a moment, 
I hope you will pause — your finger in the 
book— and think of your friends and 
acquaintances. (They deserve it, any- 
way!) 



YOUTH 7 

Some of them, as you notice, are old; 
some of them — by a sort of victorious 
instinct for doing the right thing — seem 
to have carried youth along with them 
through the years. It is curious. 

You may have motored through the 
Berkshires and stopped at a farmhouse. 
And you saw the farmer's wife. She 
came and stood in the doorway. And 
she was old. No matter how many 
years were on her head she was old. 
Fatigue lay on her body like the washed- 
out calico of her dress. An atrophied 
mind looked through her tired eyes. And 
her emotions, thwarted and repressed, 
were shelled over with apathy. She was 
old. She was a caricature of a woman — 
at once pathetic and absurd. 

I want you to get at the cause of it. 

What has done it? 

Isolation. 

The physical body has been exercised 
in doing the things — deadly monotonous 



8 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

things — in which there was no pleasure 
and, therefore, no benefit. 

Mark this: The only exercise that does 
the body any good is the exercise that is 
good fun. 

You may tramp the fields precisely as 
far as you would go in playing eighteen 
holes of golf, but it won't do you any good 
if you are going on an errand. 

The farmer is crumpled up physically 
while the golfer steps jauntily on through 
the years. Work, no matter what the 
moralists say, has no element of pleasure 
in it, for the very reason that it has to be 
done — it is enforced. The shepherdess 
in the plains of Brie is not getting any fun 
out of her dreary business — she withers 
and is old; but when Marie Antoinette 
played at being a shepherdess she got all 
the joy and vigour and helpfulness of life 
out of it. Anything is good if you play 
at it; and to play at being a farmer's 
wife, even in New England, is a delight- 



YOUTH 9 

ful adventure — but it's another thing to 
be one! 

For her the years pass; they are a 
melancholy cohort of years, without 
change; in sheer desperation she rolls her- 
self up in the fatigue of old age. What 
brain she began with rusts; and that 
splendid emotional body — which is in 
woman the storehouse of youthfulness — 
is starved; it is starved for music and 
kisses and laughter and angers and jeal- 
lousies and triumph. 

(You can hardly expect a New England 
farmer's wife to get an emotional riot out 
of loving the New England fanner who is 
her husband; or out of the sham music 
of a mail-order gramaphone.) 

Isolation. 

She is thrown back on herself. Beauty 
goes, because beauty is nothing but the 
maintenance of harmony between the 
physical, emotional, and mental elements 
of the human animal. (All young things 



10 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

are beautiful, because their parts are in 
harmony.) 

So from the woman you are looking at 
beauty departs; fatigue, which is old age, 
descends upon her. The physical body 
may carry on for years, but it is running 
on one cylinder — a thing of tragedy and 
laughter. 

She is ageless this woman, but old, old, 
old. . . . 

You have seen her in the isolation of 
the Western ranch, even as you have 
seen her on the naked hills of New 
England. She is a symbol of old age. 
She is a symbol of fatigue. She is a 
symbol of discord — physical, emotional, 
mental. 

Now: I would say and you should 
hear — 

Everything that has happened to her 
is precisely what must not happen to you 
if you wish to live and be young. 

Go to the village; I mean the pleasant 



YOUTH 11 

little town you can walk through in half 
an hour or so; anywhere 

Did you ever go back to your small 
town? 

It is a history almost universal. The 
man who has gone out into the world — 
up to London or down to New York — 
returns to his village. Lo, the village 
has shrunk to a wretched hamlet. The 
boys with whom he played in youth — his 
contemporaries — are rusty old men, while 
he, the wayfarer, is young and erect, 
filled with lustihood and the on-going 
tide of life. And for the woman returning 
to the home of her youth it is a thing even 
more tragic. Her contemporaries are 
old, old, old. . . . 

And she? 

She stares, wonderingly, into her mir- 
ror, expecting to see the wrinkles and 
devastations of age that mark the faces 
of her one-time playmates; youthfulness 
and the love of life laugh back at her from 



12 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

her mirror; then the real philosophy of 
the situation comes to her. 

"Life is what one makes it," she says, 
"and so is age!" 

And smiling, she discovers that she can 
(without disquietude) put up with old age 
— in others. 

The woman of the little town; upon her 
lies a little of that tragic, rural agefulness 
of the hill woman— not all of it; you could 
never mistake her for the woman of the 
lonely farm. And here is the point: in 
that village or in that small town isola- 
tion is relative; there is already a society — 
there is, at least in germ, a smart set, with 
its milliners and dressmakers, its games 
and debts and aspirations, its rivalries 
and emotional riots; at least in germ, a 
smart set. 

And the smart set is the very matrix 
of youthfulness. 

The further away you get from the 
loneliness of farm or ranch — the further 



YOUTH 13 

away you get from the relative isolation 
of the village or small town — the nearer 
you get to the source and fountain (fons 
et origo) of youthfulness. And it is clear, 
is it not, that if you want to get a thing 
the place to get it is where that thing is. 

Then we might as well get one dif- 
ficulty out of the way at once — here — 
or on the next page 



CHAPTER II 
Really Young People 

WHEN you repeat the statement 
that the smart set is the matrix 
of youthfulness, someone, somewhere, is 
bound to talk about "climbers" and 
" snobs/ ' These epithets are always 
ready to the hand of the slack-living, 
uncouth man, who is more comfortable 
in bad society than he is in good society — 
and he loves to throw them about. You 
know that man? He stands out in the 
commonness and indecency of the street, 
as you go up to knock at the door of a 
smart house, and shouts: "Snob!" 

Sometimes it is a woman — debarred 
by bad manners, or selfish poverty, or 
bony morals, from entering the society of 
really smart people — and she, too, makes 

14 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 15 

a noise in the street and sneers at 
"climbers." You know that woman. The 
trouble is she gets the ear of a lot of fool- 
ish folk who have never thought about 
the matter and they go about like green 
parrots, repeating that it is a shocking 
thing to be a "climber." 

Moreover: The woman who is not a 
social climber is a disgrace to her family 
and to her husband (if the poor creature 
has one), a burden and a clog. I could 
convince you in a few moments that it is 
her duty, as an unselfish woman, to 
climb. It is her duty to climb that she 
may give little brother a leg-up in the 
world. It is her duty to climb that she 
may enlarge her husband's social oppor- 
tunities. That is true; and an unselfish 
woman would need no other motive; but 
I do not wish to harp on the string of un- 
selfishness — most women have too much 
of it 

The woman owes it to herself to be a 



16 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

social climber; she owes it to herself to 
reach a social position better than that to 
which she was born. And make no mis- 
take; no one is born at the top, for the top 
is not a stationary point — always the 
social world is in a state of flux and re- 
flux. 

Very well; climb — don't be afraid of 
being called a snob. Be one. Don't 
be afraid of the epithets of envious out- 
siders. Don't be fooled by cant. The 
best is none too good for you. Whether 
it is in the country or the village or the 
city the men and women you want to 
know are the best — those who are getting 
the best out of life — those who have beau- 
tiful homes and social influence — those 
who play games and make an art of 
pleasant things — in a word, those who 
are smart. Don't be fooled by cant. 
Don't be fooled by all this cheap talk 
about the beauty of plain living. Poverty, 
especially when it is honest, is disgusting. 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 17 

It is tragic, I admit, but only a lunatic 
or an Indiana novelist would dream of 
praising it. You may admire the ir- 
rational valour of poor people, but you 
don't want any of it in yours. It is all 
sheer hypocrisy — all this maudlin talk 
poured out in order to make poor people 
contented with poverty. Don't be fooled 
by it. Get rich — climb- 

The man or woman who is willing to be 
anything but top-dog is an effigy of sloth, 
selfishness, and dry-rot. 

To climb means energy; it means un- 
selfishness — for you must carry others 
with you. 

See how it works when you reverse it. 

Now and then a girl in the smart set, 
bred for a dainty, enjoyable, joy-giving 
life among nice people, runs away and 
marries the chauffeur. She drops to his 
manners. She keys herself to his coarse 
life. Does she find happiness? She does 
not find happiness, unless she is the kind 



18 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

of a girl who should have been born in a 
garage, fed in a kitchen, and bedded in an 
attic. And the young man of that set 
who runs violently out of doors and mar- 
ries a slum-girl, because she says she loves 
humanity, isn't going to find happiness, 
for 

No one finds happiness by climbing 
down. 

It is all very pretty in a play or in a 
book, I daresay. I don't know. 

I once read a book by Maurice Hewlett 
in which a lady stooped out of her class 
and married a butcher's boy; it gave me 
a nephretic colic. But even if climbing 
down may pass muster in a book of fic- 
tion, it does not work well in real life. 
In real life it is the deuce and all. 

You laugh at the wine-agent who cranes 
himself up into good society? 

All right; but I know I should have 
wept tears of anguish had I seen him 
climb down and be a mere beer-agent. Of 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 19 

course he is a snob; but what of it? If 
one isn't born among nice people isn't it 
better to climb up among them than 
it is to sit outside in the indecency of 
the street and envy them? You know 
perfectly well (when you are honest with 
yourself) that you prefer to travel in 
the cabin-de-luxe and not in the steerage. 
And in the social world it is all relative. 
There is a cabin-de-luxe in Cleveland 
society just as there is in that of Paris. 

And here we come hard upon the point 
I would drive home. It is not for the 
good of your soul that Fve been urging 
you to pay no heed to the canting hypo- 
crites who bleat about social snobbery; 
I have a deeper motive in trying to per- 
suade you to recognize the sanity and 
beauty of smart living, for it is in the 
smart set — more than anywhere else — 
that you find the people who are carrying 
youthfulness with them. Defiantly they 
are refusing to be old. 



20 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

They are living and being young. 

Often, I admit, they are doing it by 
accident. Their youthfulness is due to a 
lucky hazard. They do not quite know- 
how they have so victoriously maintained 
it. It is my purpose in this book, as you 
know, to demonstrate how you may 
methodically and with malice afore- 
thought go on living and being young, 
but the fact that in the smart set there is 
a larger measure of youthfulness than 
anywhere else should set you thinking, 
should it not? 

If you want a thing go where it is easiest 
to be had. Don't go hunting orchids 
in Canada. If you want youth you must 
climb for it. 

Why put up with second-rate society 
and second-rate clothes and second-rate 
emotions and second-rate friends? 

It is axiomatic: The woman who does 
not climb socially is a failure and de- 
serves to fall lower than her birthright — 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 21 

to fall and grow old among the ill consid- 
ered, disillusioned, the crabbed daughters 
of envy. I warn you once more that the 
envious moralists, who have failed to get 
anything out of life, are going to call you 
a snob. Don't heed them. Avaricious 
old men are going to preach the sacred 
beauties of poverty. Indiana novelists 
are going to beg you on their knees to 
elope with the chauffeur. Maurice Hew- 
lett will offer you the butcher's boy. Let 
them talk on. Don't be poor; in order to 
live and be young you must have money, 
for it is a ladder to climb by. Do not be 
afraid of other people's money. Rich 
people are, nine times out of ten, pleas- 
anter, kindlier, better bred, and less sel- 
fish than poor folk — they can afford to 
be; and they are more enjoyable play- 
mates and steadier friends. And do not 
listen to the canting praise of slumdon 
simplicity and poverty — out of which 
men are too slackly selfish to pull them- 



22 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

selves and their families. When the 
slackers call you "snob," tilt your nose 
in the air — and climb. 

(What you are climbing for, dear 
woman, is youth — as you shall see, if 
you read on. And why not? You won't 
find anything better to read.) 

Now relatively, in greater or less degree, 
there is not a group of human beings, 
aggregated on the planet, which has not 
its smart set. And this smart set is not 
based wholly on wealth or on birth. 
Every village has its best people. They 
may not be the ones you think they are. 
If they are old looking and frowsy, if they 
have wasted their fund of youthfulness 
in getting such negligible things as excess 
of honours or wealth, they are not the best 
people. They have been mastered by 
greed and selfishness. They gave them- 
selves too much and paid for it in coin 
of youth. They probably ke^p urging 
you to look at their moral beauty and 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 23 

civic renown. As a matter of fact, they 
have made a selfish mess of their lives. 
(God help the woman who is married to 
one of these creatures who squats on a 
heap of money and feeds himself with 
honours; his daughter is the one who 
marries the gas-fitter's assistant.) They 
are not the best people. They are not 
even nice. Really nice people do not 
barter away youth and pleasure and hap- 
piness. { 

No, the people you want to know in 
your town — you can recognize them from 
afar — are playing together. The smart 
set plays. And, dear woman, the essence 
of youth is play. The secret of youth- 
fulness is a game. 

That is one truism. Another is that 
no one, except a maniac, can play alone. 

(The woman or man who plays "pa- 
tience" is burning incense to old age.) 

The farmer's wife in New England 
(whereof something has been written) if 



24 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

she plays at all has to play alone, or with 
a hen or a child; therefore is she crusted 
over with age, while her happier sister, 
with village opportunities for playing 
with other human beings, keeps a measure 
of youth. Thus, even in a small com- 
munity, so long as there is in it the germ 
of a smart set, youthfulness need not 
perish. It is, of course, easier in a large 
community where there are ampler op- 
portunities for keeping the body young 
by playing with play-loving people, for 
giving the emotions the kind of food they 
need, whether it be love or laughter, music 
or rivalry, and for exercising the mind by 
keeping in touch with all that is blithest 
and newest and most agile in the world 
of thought. 

(New things; if you drive an old motor- 
car, wear old clothes, sing old songs, read 
the faded fiction of other days, you are 
getting old, old, old. . . .) 

It is a plain fact that the youth-keep- 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 25 

ing people are neither of the farm nor of 
the small town. If now and then you 
find them there they are accidental — like 
the two-headed calf. Statistics dem- 
onstrate (and your own observation is 
confirmatory) that the immense majority 
of those who know how to live and be 
young — to live long and be young — be- 
long to the smart sets of the great capitols 
of the world. They swing through the 
seasons, from the ballroom to the moun- 
tains, from the hunting field to the sea. 
There is a time when they are in Paris 
or New York; there is as inevitable a time 
when they are in Nice or at Palm Beach 
or San Diego or Algiers; they dip their 
bodies in the sea or bathe their tired 
emotions in music; but what they do 
you know. 

Now it is evident that not everyone 
can swing through the seasons in this 
pleasant way. There wouldn't be room 
in the social merry-go-round for all of us 



26 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

who have decided to live and be young 
through the years. And yet in some way 
we must do the same thing — or an 
equivalent thing that will pay us in the 
same coin. So what we have to do is to 
find the law that underlies this pleasant 
manner of living and explains why these 
people have discovered — to some extent — 
the art of preserving youth. 

Why is it the farmer's wife is old at 
thirty? And Lady Smartington young 
at sixty or seventy? The answer is that 
they have lived different lives; and our 
interest is in that life of Lady Smarting- 
ton, which made, inadvertently, for 
youthfulness. I do not claim that her 
life is especially beautiful or notably 
noble. Perhaps it is; and again it may 
not be. That is not the point. What is 
true is that she has discovered part of the 
law — not all of it — that underlies the 
maintenance of youthfulness. 

There is then a distinct and certain law 



REALLY YOUNG PEOPLE 27 

underlying the seemingly lawless lives of 
the smart set? 

Unquestionably. 

And this law once it is clearly under- 
stood may be followed — not in the hap- 
hazard way Lady Smartington follows 
it — but in a precise and scientific manner, 
which will successfully maintain the con- 
dition of youth, not only in those who 
foregather in London or at Monte Carlo 
but for those who dwell in the small com- 
munities or even on the farm of which 
you have read. 

The smart set way is empiric. It de- 
pends upon chance and luck. It counts 
as many failures as successes, because 
these people are doing blindly, in a sort of 
instinctive way, what you and I and 
Marie-Louise may do in the knowing and 
scientific way that compels success. Only 
one might as well be honest and give 
the society devil his due: In that light- 
going world of society the art of staying 



28 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

young was first practised with success; 
and all that is good in this practice we 
are going to take over and transmute into 
scientific law. 

The smart set is a sort of Benjamin 
Franklin; it flew a kite and by a queer 
kind of luck pulled down the electricity of 
youth. 

And that was a beginning — an amazing 
beginning; but in these days of Marconi 
the kite of Franklin is vieux jeu and you 
and I know the etheric waves of youth- 
fulness do not travel best on a kite string 
— they obey laws vast as the universe. 

You do not mind reading on, do you? 

For in some way you must understand 
the laws of youthfulness if you are to 
carry it with you through the long, kind 
years. 



CHAPTER III 

The Enemies of Youth 

THEY used to tell us: A man is as 
old as his muscles — which was 
absurdity; then they picked up the par- 
rot-phrase: "A man is as old as his ar- 
teries" — in which there was even less 
plausibility. 

What is true is that Youth is the Will- 
to-Live and the measure of youth is pre- 
cisely the measure of your will to be alive. 
Muscles and arteries and every bounc- 
ing atom of the body are always subor- 
dinate to the vital force that governs 
them. There are old men of twenty; 
there are young men of eighty — and how 
far a woman may carry her youth with 
her not even Ninon de l'Enclos has de- 
termined. (The grandson of one of her 

29 



30 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

earlier lovers met her in the years, fell 
in love with her eternal beauty — died 
of it.) 

The will to live 

You may think of the Will-to-Live as 
the charioteer of the vital forces, who can 
drive them as fast as he will or on the 
other hand as far as he will. Now and 
again science, lifting its eyes from the 
material dust, gets a vision of the larger 
truth. A few months ago Doctor Eu- 
gene Fisk of the New York Life Exten- 
sion Institute said that in a little while 
science would be able to make us live two 
thousand years. He explained this af- 
firmation by saying that youth was not a 
function of time — he was right — but a 
physical state, and that science could 
prevent the wearing out of the organism 
and preserve an almost eternal youth. 

There may be a touch of exaggeration 
in Doctor Fisk's theory. 

When the scientist at last begins to 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 31 

react against the heavy accumulation 
of errors his predecessors have left him 
as a legacy he is often tempted into ex- 
travagance of statement. The errors 
of the past weigh heavy on us all. We 
accept half-truths because they are old — 
musty lies because they have a venera- 
ble look. 

There is one lie which has done more 
harm than all others. It is the hoary old 
lie which has come croaking down the 
ages, proclaiming that the years of man 
are three-score or three-score and ten; 
and because it came with quasi-religious 
credentials it stamped itself deep in 
human credulity. Life refutes it — again 
and again and in a thousand places 

The old lie croaking but victorious goes 
on its way; and the average man, who 
hears it repeated day and night, believes 
it. 

When he is sixty he says to himself: 
"Here, this will never do — I ought to 



32 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

be dead," and if, in spite of himself, he 
staggers on to seventy he feels he has 
cheated destiny and dies of shame at 
the distressing thought. Killed by the 
lie. And so the generations go shuffling 
to the grave, victims of an illusion which 
only of late have a few bold scientists 
dared to confront. The present life of 
man is out of all proportion to his organ- 
ism, if you make a comparison between 
him and the other living beings on the 
planet. His logical measure of life is 
about one hundred and fifty years^ 
granted only that he had the will to live 
it. Three active agents work ceaselessly 
to pull him down and toss him into his 
grave. One is his foolish way of living; 
another is the implacable suggestion that 
at a certain date he ought to be dead; 
and the third is that the Will-to-Live 
breaks and falls to pieces. 

For the moment you and I are con- 
cerned in knowing what youth is; and in 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 33 

order to know it we must look closely 
at its enemies — these dark agents that 
pull it down. 

Man has been so impressed with the 
suggestion that he ought to stop living 
at sixty or seventy that only a few ex- 
ceptional individuals react against it; 
and when old Parr, for instance, lives 
pleasantly along until he is one hundred 
and fifty his amazed contemporaries 
look upon him as a " freak" and shame 
him out of life. And even to-day the 
same attitude is maintained toward the 
thousands of centenarians living in 
Europe and in the Americas. They are 
stared at as prodigies. They are hated 
as exceptions, by the huge majority of 
mankind, victim, as it is, of the illusion 
that it is only decent to die at three-score 
and ten. When that good man Mr. Shell 
of Kentucky at one hundred and twenty- 
five years of age took to himself a wife the 
victims of the death-illusion cackled with 



34 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

laughter. Why? Mr. Shell was a "freak," 
he had not yielded to the illusion. Now 
as a blunt matter of fact Mr. Shell was 
a normal man, living and being young. 
Do you think the mob — which has 
doomed itself to die in order to fulfil a 
quasi-religious delusion — will let him live 
his youth out in peace? 

They will shame him into the grave 
before he is one hundred and fifty. 

Even Mr. Shell's son disapproved Mr. 
Shell's bright adventure in love, and his 
great-grandchildren hung their heads 
as though some dark disaster had fallen 
upon the honourable family. And the 
entire village of Greasy Creek, Kentucky, 
mourned with them — or laughed and 
jeered. 

Greasy Creek is like the rest of the 
world. 

It is suggestionized by the inane theory 
that there is something occult and rather 
indecent about not dying at three-score 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 35 

and ten. Its science of life has never 
got beyond the dictum of that mournful 
Hebrew psalmist of a few thousand years 
ago. 

("And if by reason of great strength" 
a man carries on until eighty he ought 
to be knocked on the head — or chloro- 
formed as the physician with the German 
name advised. There is much folly in 
the world, mes enfants.) 

Yes, there is much folly, and the sad 
part of it is that folly love's to trick itself 
out in the robes of religion or science or 
philosophy. 

Do you remember how Balzac was 
killed? Houssaye tells the story. 

Balzac was stricken down and his huge 
body was ill at ease. A physician was 
called; he shook his serious head. 

"What?" asked Balzac, "I am very 
ill." 

Science looked graver still. 

"But how long can I live? I have 



36 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

work to do. A year, two years? Tell 
me the truth, doctor. Don't take me for 
a child. I owe something to the public. 
Tell me." 

"How long will it take you to finish 
the work you have to do?" the doctor 
asked. 

Balzac reflected; then he looked stead- 
ily at the doctor and said: "Six months." 
Science shook its head. 

Balzac fell back on his pillow. 

"Six weeks then?" he asked, feebly. 

And as before science shook its head; 
the physician having been asked to "tell 
the truth" was rigorously telling what 
he thought was the truth — a heroic man. 

"What! It is my death-warrant you 
are pronouncing? I am a dead man? 
Six days, doctor — I must finish my work 
— I can do it roughly in outline — the 
human will can work miracles. Give me 
six days and on the seventh I shall — 
rest." 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 37 

In these few moments Balzac had lost 
ten years of life. His body was shrinking 
in on itself. _ 

"Well?" 

"Who can count on even one day?" 
asked the physician and he added: "If 
you have something that must be done do 
it to-day." 

* ' Six hours ! ' ' Balzac cried with horror ; he 
fell back on his bed and the death-agony 
began; in six hours he was dead — not of 
disease but of the prediction of science. 

Suggestion. 

If suggestion is strong enough to kill 
the individual it becomes infinitely 
stronger when it is applied to the mass. 

You have seen the last decade shattered 
by mob-suggestion: battles, revolutions, 
tumult ... it is upon suggestive 
hallucinations that expert politicians 
build their huge campaigns that sweep 
millions of unprotesting men along the 
same current of public opinion. 



38 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Once an idea gets into the public 
mind it goes on repeating itself, becoming 
stronger by each repetition. 

The idea that man should die at three- 
score or three-score and ten has opened 
like an abyss on the road of life. There 
it lies, monstrous, not to be passed, and 
humanity, shuddering, throws itself into 
the abyss. 

First, then, mankind has a false con- 
ception of life — that there is a definite 
age limit. 

Second, it has a false conception of 
death — that yonder, at the further edge 
of the half century, death waits in ambush. 

And these two conceptions — lies in 
essence— have poisoned and paralyzed 
the generations of mankind and robbed 
them of more than half their years upon 
this planet. Look round among your 
friends. When that dark, predicted sixty 
years begins to approach men and women 
enter a cloud of fear; they begin to create 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 39 

an atmosphere of the grave; they let go; 
they begin to turn inward on themselves; 
and their thoughts race ahead of them 
toward the abyss. Modern scientists — 
even the popularizers of modern science — 
will tell you that the normal human 
machine is built to run one hundred and 
fifty years. The laws governing the 
duration of life are tolerably well known. 
Buffon's theory was that the period of 
growth is the measuring rod for the dura- 
tion of life. The animal of every species 
takes a certain definite time to attain 
its normal growth; and from this growth- 
period one can calculate the length of life 
to which it is entitled. Buff on fixed the 
duration of life at about seven times the 
period of growth. Thus the horse, be- 
coming adult at four years of age, should 
live for from twenty-five to thirty years; 
the deer matures between five and six and 
should live to be thirty-five or forty-five 
years old. 



40 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Now man goes on growing until he is 
twenty years old, at which time the 
growth of the bony structure ceases. 

I submit a simple problem in mathemat- 
ics: seven times twenty equals one hun- 
dred and forty. 

Or this way: 7x20=140. 

And there you are. 

The age of one hundred and forty is 
in no way incompatible with the con- 
stitution of the human body; and though 
in each generation few attain that age 
there are instances enough to confirm 
the theory. (Last year in Rome Count 
Greppi, senator and diplomat, cele- 
brated his one hundredth birthday by 
giving a the dansant at the Excelsior; 
and, with approbation, I watched him 
dancing with the prettiest woman in the 
room.) 

Leaving aside infant mortality, it is 
between seventy and seventy-five years 
that "lethality reaches its culminating 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 41 

point," as the scientists say in their 
queer but understandable English. 

Why? 

Suggestionized by the psalmist. 

It is a fact that the greatest number 
of those who die at this age are still well- 
preserved physically and mentally. Death 
is rarely — very rarely — due to senile 
debility. Mark that! They die of in- 
fectious diseases, of pneumonia or tuber- 
culosis or heart-failure or liver com- 
plaint — of what you will; but these 
deaths should be set down to accidental 
causes, for they are not natural deaths — 
they are not due to the gradual and nat- 
ural exhaustion of the vital forces. Then 
the normal man who dies before he is one 
hundred and forty years of age dies the 
victim of an accidental death or has, in 
one way or another, committed suicide. 
In one way or another he has broken up 
his youthfulness and destroyed his Will- 
to-Live. Accident or suicide. 



42 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

The scientists will tell you they have 
never been able to study in man a case of 
natural death. They assume that it 
exists, but they have never seen it. Doc- 
tor Serge Veronoff, of the College de 
France, says bluntly : " I do not know that 
natural physiological death has ever been 
observed in men, because even those who 
die in extreme old age, without apparent 
malady, show, at an autopsy, lesions and 
alterations of the tissues which prove 
clearly that death has been caused by 
lesions, more or less grave, of certain 
organs. Therefore, if natural death exists 
■ — and it is impossible not to admit it — it 
ought not to be frequent at the age at 
which it usually takes place/ ' 

Men die too soon. 

Count Greppi may live out his life — he 
has made a good start — as old Parr did, 
dying at one hundred and fifty-two years 
and nine months, leaving a son who lived 
for one hundred and twenty-five years. 



THE ENEMIES OF YOUTH 43 

Few of us will live out our allotted years, 
and if I were writing a book on longevity 
I should have more than a little to say of 
the accidents that snatch us away or the 
cowardice that makes us lay life down. 
The only reason I have emphasized the 
fact that we are cheated out of one half 
our life-period — the fact that we are born 
to live one hundred and forty years and 
do not do it — is this: 

Since the period of longevity is one 
hundred and forty years the period of youth 
is proportionate. 

It is not at seventy you should abandon 
youth, or at ninety, or at one hundred, 
if you are a normal man. Just as longe- 
vity can be determined for each animal 
species, so can that animal's proportion 
of normal youthfulness be fixed. The 
deer is out of his immaturity (roughly 
speaking) at six; at thirty-five he admits 
his reign of youth is over; gradually he 
settles into the decadence of age and at 



44 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

forty-two dies a natural death from senile 
debility. When the same law is applied 
to man it is evident that — bar accident — 
he should not begin to think of senescent 
decay until he is well over one hundred. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Elixir of Youth 

I HAVE said that youth is the will-to- 
live; that old age is fatigue; and that 
the normal life of the human animal 
should be over twice as long as it is. 

Evidently there is something horribly 
wrong in the way we live. One should 
go on living and being young to well over 
a hundred instead of crumpling up with 
the fatigue of old age halfway along the 
road. Perhaps the best way to get at the 
heart of the question is to ask ourselves 
what are the chief causes of this fatigue 
that pulls humanity down ere half its 
course is run. The causes are many and 
various. I might give you a list that 
would fill a volume merely in enumera- 
tion, but here (and in this book) we are 

45 



46 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

concerned with only one branch of the 
subject. The question, as I have said, is 
not that of longevity. It is a beastly 
shame that you don't live to be one hun- 
dred and forty, but it is not my business 
here to show you how to do it. This is 
not a study of longevity. Obscure causes, 
many of them hereditary, are conspiring 
to hound you out of life long before your 
time. In a little while science is going to 
remove many of these uses. The race will 
pick itself up. It will learn the art of 
long life. It will have a term of life in 
some reasonable proportion to its physical 
structure. That will come. Longevity, 
proportionate to the staunchness of the 
machine, will be the next victorious 
achievement of science. 

Meanwhile, what can you do? 

You can live and so preserve youthful- 
ness that you need not drag out a broken, 
wobbling, and devastated life; you may 
live and be young up to the moment the 



THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH 47 

clock strikes twelve. Possibly you may 
extend your life-limit; beyond a doubt 
you will — but that will be a by-product 
of felicity. The chief thing you are to 
learn here is to get old age — that fatigue 
that makes for senility — out of your life. 
In four words (and I know no better words 
in all the dictionaries) you will learn how 
to "live and be young." 

I should like to be able to give you the 
secret of living to the age of old Parr, or 
of Paul the Hermit, or Saint Narcissus 
(who stopped living at 169), or Marcus 
Apponius, or the great surgeon Politiman 
who lived from 1685 to 1825 — precisely 
one hundred and forty years — or thou- 
sands of others who have lived out the 
true measure of their lives; but the secret is 
only beginning to be known to the most 
advanced scientists (like Veronoff) and the 
famous elixir of youth is not yet dis- 
covered — though it will be, authorities 
state, the next achievement of science. 



48 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Already the experiments made on ani- 
mals promise important results. These 
experiments have been so numerous, the 
results have been so constant, that even 
the sceptics have had to accept the 
facts. 

You may know Doctor Veronoff's 
experiments. 

Senile animals, wretched, tottering on 
their old legs, feeble, were taken; upon 
them Doctor Veronoff grafted the in- 
terstitial glands of young animals; and 
the old buck, or the old dog, came back 
to his youth — he was alert, full of energy, 
force, courage, strength. These old ani- 
mals had been picked out by veterinary 
surgeons; they were pronounced to be 
hopeless cases — with only a few weeks' 
life in them. To-day, three years after 
taking the Veronoff treatment, they are 
going strong. They are full of vigour. 
They show no signs of senile decay. They 
are the goatish or doggish fathers of 



THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH 49 

young ones. In a word, Doctor Veronoff 
has discovered in the interstitial gland a 
marvellous source of vital energy which 
can restore to a decrepit organism the 
force of youth. And other scientists are 
experimenting on other lines to discover 
the secret of prolonging life. That dis- 
covery is knocking at the door. A longer 
life is due you. And a longer period of 
youth. For even as we die too soon, so 
we grow old before our time. You may 
not live to one hundred and forty but 
what you can do is to keep erect the youth 
within you and carry on, like a human 
being not like a machine. 

For mark this: 

Youth is not a time-measure. 

A few centuries ago — the records are in 
the fiction of the eighteenth century and 
of the early nineteenth — the girl who had 
missed marriage at eighteen was looked 
at askance; at twenty she was on the 
shelf. Balzac created an enormous scandal 



50 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

when he set out to prove in a famous book 
that a " Woman of Thirty " was capable of 
loving and being loved. 

The woman of our day — those at least 
of the smart set, where life is sanest — 
have gained twenty years on that fragile 
heroine of the last century. They can 
love and be loved at fifty — live and love 
and carry on — and be young. 

If the old conception were true that at 
three-score a woman had to be thrown 
into the abyss like sjiot rubbish, it would 
not be unreasonable to aver that at fifty 
she should be crusted over with age; but 
that old conception is false — she has still 
almost one hundred years to her credit. 
Here is the truth; even if there were 
such a thing as an age-limit and youth- 
fulness could be measured by the yard- 
stick of time, it is not at three-score 
that the normal human animal should 
begin to look for death, but at five- 
score. 



THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH 51 

Science is revising age- values. 

As I have said it has already pushed the 
youth-limit for women twenty years 
ahead of what it was in the last century. 
And men are being permitted, without 
reproach, to live and be young longer 
than they were a few generations ago. 
Of course men and women alike have to 
fight against the eternal conspiracy to 
hustle them into their graves when the 
three-score " limit' ' is attained. With 
kindly astonishment friends and neigh- 
bours exclaim: "How well you look!" 
And the unhappy man (or woman) does 
not retort: "Why the deuce shouldn't 
I look well!" He knows, she knows, 
what was behind that remark was the 
universal illusion that at three-score he, 
or she, ought not to look well — he ought 
(according to the primitive science of the 
ancient Hebrew) to be dead. 

Imbeciles everywhere are always ex- 
pressing their sympathetic surprise that 



52 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

three-score man is not doddering toward 
the tomb. 

"Eat ail right? Sleep all right? Isn't 
that splendid!" 

As though it were a miracle. 

So the poor man thinks of death and — ■ 
to please the family and not be a " freak' ' 
— takes to his bed and dies; when what 
he really had in mind was to marry a 
chorus girl and go to Monte Carlo for 
the winter. 

If you tell a woman, again and again, 
that she is old — she will shrink up and 
wither away into old age before your eyes. 
It is iterated suggestion. 

I knew a woman who had not one ele- 
ment of beauty about her except hair and 
teeth — which she shared with any cat; 
and the man who had to live with her 
forever was a lover of beauty; so, not 
unselfishly, he told her, ceaselessly and 
systematically, that she was beautiful, 
until she began to say the same thing to 



THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH 53 

her mirror and to herself; and to-day 
she is beautiful — an acknowledged beauty 
in two continents. 

And I think of one of the beautiful 
women of Paris — an actress of celebrity. 
Paris was raving over her extraordinary 
beauty. And, laughing, she said: 

"I am the ugliest actress that ever 
stood on the stage of any theatre. And 
I know it. I've got the eyes of a squirrel 
and the mouth of a fish and the waist 
of a wasp and the foot of an ogre. Com- 
pare me with any woman you please and 
you'll find no one uglier than I am." 

This discovery enchanted her. She 
dangled it in the eyes of her admirers: 

"Maisje suis laide, laide, laide!" 

And then she confessed, which was 
good for her soul and for my instruction — 
and yours: 

"I suffered horribly," she said, "when 
I was trying to be beautiful. I was sing- 
ing at the Cigale and I tried my best to 



54 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

be as beautiful as the other girls. I 
curled my hair and powdered my face. 
I spent every penny I had on clothes 
and gewgaws. And everyone laughed 
at me. Then one day I woke up and told 
myself the reason I was not beautiful 
was because I was trying to make myself 
over into someone else. Since I was built 
like a wasp I put on a dress that exag- 
gerated my waspy shape; instead of paint- 
ing my eyes I left them as they were — 
little eyes of a squirrel; and since I had 
the feet of an ogre I put them into flat 
slippers where they felt at home; and I 
cropped my silly hair and let it fluff out 
round my ears in the way it liked best; 
and when I went on the stage that night — 
you remember! — Paris hailed me as a 
beauty. And now, of course, I know I 
am beautiful." 

And she is. 

The suggestion, compelling, universal 
of Tout-Paris, has made her beautiful. 



THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH 55 

Do you see? 

The suggestion, universal and implac- 
able, of a three-score age-limit is destroy- 
ing humanity ere half its race on the 
planet is rim; and the equally implacable 
suggestion that youthfulness should stop 
at a decent number of years before the 
age-limit, thus artificially set, has robbed 
humanity of youth. 

That is a fact — a formidable fact. 

Now youth is the Will-to-Live. 

It is thwarted by idiotic ways of living, 
many of them imposed upon us by antique 
and hereditary superstitions; and by that 
darker superstition (which dates from a 
far-off barbarous age when even psalmists 
knew nothing of biophysiology) that youth 
is dependent upon an artificial age-limit. 

Take these two statements: 

The normal human animal, dying at 
three-score or three-score and ten, is com- 
mitting suicide — or being assassinated. 

You are young as your Will-to-Live. 



CHAPTER V 
Physical Youth 

VERY few men know how to live in 
the present. They live in the past 
on old memories or they dream about 
the future. And what almost every man 
sees in the future is death at seventy. I 
am not sure I can persuade him, the 
average man, to rectify his ideas of the 
future, but I may possibly persuade him 
to live in the present — not to go digging 
up the bones of the past; and not to go 
digging a premature grave for his own 
bones in the future. He may learn to 
look upon life as it is and upon himself 
as a living entity, dynamic and psychic, 
that needs only to be kept fit in order 
to make the present a quasi-permanent 
state. 

56 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 57 

You are not one man; you are three. 
You are leading a triple life, as one might 
say, physical, mental, and emotional, and 
there are two enemies trying to pull you 
down and dip you in the tepid waters 
of old age. 

What are these enemies? 

First, fatigue of all these personalities 
that make up your composite body; 
and second, quarrelsomeness between the 
three bodies. 

Fatigue is old age — fatigue is one 
enemy of youth; but an equally dangerous 
enemy of youth is lack of harmony be- 
tween your physical strength and your 
strength of mind. For old age has noth- 
ing to do with time or your journey 
through the years. It is nothing more nor 
less than the sign-manual of your bodily 
fatigue or your psychic disharmony. 
Therefore this is not a question of longe- 
vity. Living in a state of harmonious 
non-fatigue is youth. Now a machine 



58 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

can be worn out by over-use and it can 
become just as decrepit by under-use; 
it can be shaken to pieces or it can rust 
away; each is a condition of old age. It 
is a commonplace that you have to keep 
the machine in order — every part of it. 

I am going to lay down for you certain 
rules; and before you begin to examine 
these rules of the game of youth I want 
you to stand up for a moment and look at 
yourself in the tall pier-glass in your bed- 
room — just as you are when you step out 
of your bathtub. Look at yourself from 
head to foot; examine that long white 
body, with its shadows and hollows, which 
your father and mother gave you to walk 
the world in. What you see is the physi- 
cal body. There is only one rule for 
keeping that physical body young: move- 
ment. There is only one law which the 
body must obey: the law of movement; 
but bear in mind that this law is the law of 
natural and instinctive movement. I 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 59 

take it that you are a normal man. I 
take it that you are a normal woman — 
that your long white body, with its hol- 
lows and curves, is that of the normal 
man or woman of your race. Then for 
you artificial exercise is always wrong. 

Only for abnormal people is artificial 
exercise ever right. 

If you have a stiff arm you can limber 
it up by certain prescribed exercises — 
educative exercises; but the only exercise 
that does the normal person any good is 
that which gives him the greatest amount 
of pleasure with the least effort. That 
is, the pleasure should be in the move- 
ment itself. If you do not enjoy driving a 
golf ball — do something else — or nothing. 
Athletes sacrifice their youth to muscular 
development— that is the price they pay 
—they fatigue their muscles, and fatigue 
is old age. 

Do you remember the Olympian 
games? That monstrous error of Greek 



60 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

civilization which has poisoned humanity 
for two thousand years? Greece had a 
wild theory that there was something 
admirable in athletic contests — to set 
its young lads to compete in furious 
bouts of wrestling or running or leaping; 
and the world went on following the 
Greek example of physical competition. 
It is easy enough to see why we followed 
that disastrous example; to Greece we 
are indebted for treasures of intellectual 
and moral education, and naturally enough 
when she told us to run round in a circle 
or wrestle like madmen we thought it 
was quite the right thing to do. And so 
the youth of the world has gone on wreck- 
ing its muscular development in competi- 
tive and professional games which are 
merely a short cut to physical old age. 
Your runner in the Olympiads tires out 
his heart and lungs; they decline into old 
age. Your professional dancer takes on 
herself the difficult task of transmuting 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 61 

musical rhythms into physical rhythms; 
and her brain-cells weaken and tire — she 
grows old by psychic fatigue. And this 
is true of all people who as the saying is 
"take exercise' ' — who specialize in certain 
physical movements. They burn up their 
fund of youthfulness. Now I have said 
and I want to say again — for repetition 
is the soul of truth — that this book is 
written for you and me and other normal 
people; and the normal person is neither 
young nor old — neither struggling out of 
immaturity nor falling down into decay. 
You have twenty years for growth; and 
over a hundred years for your period of 
normality; then, if you want to, you 
can begin to prepare for old age. There- 
fore the one rule for normal people is 
this: 

So far as exercise is concerned do not 
specialize. 

Don't stand up in front of your mirror 
and play with silly dumb-bells. Don't 



62 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

pull silly ropes tied to weights in your 
bathroom. Don't bend your unhappy 
body fourteen times, tapping your fore- 
head on the rug. Don't lie on your back 
and kick each leg out thirty-two times. 
Don't do any of the foolish things that 
the professors of physical education — who 
have to make a living at your expense, 
God help them — tell you to do in their 
books. (Don't read their books anyway 
— that way madness lies and old age and 
other morbid things; read my books and 
live and be young.) 

Don't specialize. 

Your body is a biological democracy, 
made up of a trillion cells, each one of 
which is dependent upon the collaboration 
of the others. You can't pet and coddle 
one group of cells to the detriment of the 
others without dragging your body down 
into the discord and fatigue of old age. 
For instance: 

You walk with your muscles; you run 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 63 

with your lungs; you gallop with your heart; 
you resist with your stomach; you achieve 
with your brain. 

Now what do you want to do? 

Do you want to become an animal that 
can walk? Then you may specialize in 
that sort of exercise which will make you 
a walking animal. If you want to be able 
to run down a hare or win in the Olympian 
games you will probably be willing to pay 
away your lungs and your heart in order 
to attain this end. And the same with 
stomach and brain — you may pay them 
away for exceptional success in any one 
department of physical renown. But 
the normal man must preserve every one 
of these organs in its normal state. He 
must not walk too far, or run too fast, or 
eat too much, or be too clever — and per- 
haps excess of intelligence is the chief 
peril for the men and women of our gene- 
ration. 

I have asked you what you want to do. 



64 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

As a matter of fact, I did not need to ask 
you for I know. You fatigue yourself 
physically according to your character. 
It gives you away. A scientific observer 
looking at your body can tell you just 
what exercise you take — just what mus- 
cles you habitually use; and from his ob- 
servation he can deduce your economic 
value to humanity: 

"Tell me how you exercise,' ' he will 
say, "and I will tell you what you are." 

The reason is plain: exercise of any sort 
and of any part of the body results in 
a certain measure of fatigue; and this 
fatigue is in exact proportion to the 
nerve potentiality of the man. Do you 
see the point? The physical movements 
that a man makes are a clear index of his 
character. Movement is the man. When 
you think, always you are thinking about 
a movement that you are going to make; 
and when you act — whether you run or 
lie down — always you have translated 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 65 

a thought into movement. Therefore 
bear in mind that your physical exercises 
are going to react upon the mind and 
upon the emotions. I have already put 
a great many don'ts into this chapter; 
but I want to put one more and an 
emphatic one: 

Don't think that when you are intel- 
lectually tired and overworked that you can 
recuperate by physical activity. Fatigue 
adds: it never subtracts. 

The physical fatigue which results 
from a game of hand-ball never picks you 
up from the intellectual fatigue of over- 
work. On the contrary, it doubles it. 
You add one fatigue to another and dig 
for yourself a pit of old age. Therefore, 
never take physical exercise when you 
are mentally tired; never play games 
unless you want to play; never do any- 
thing you don't want to do. Remember 
that after all you are yourself. You are 
the son of someone, so far as the nervous 



66 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

system goes. There is a great deal in 
heredity. One man is born rested just 
as another is born tired. The lazy man is 
one who is born hereditarily fatigued. His 
nervous centres do not react physically 
or psychically to the stimulation which 
would be sufficient to make his untired 
brother leap a hedge. He cannot be ex- 
pected to carry on through the physical 
adventures which please the man who 
was not born lazy. He cannot go on 
getting perpetual physical excitement 
out of tennis or golf. His physical nature 
demands a more poignant and novel 
excitation. The lazy man, born lazy, 
cannot go on playing the same game all 
the time. But you would be surprised 
to find how active he becomes when you 
startle him with the novelty of new 
sports and new adventures. Then he 
wakes up. 

There is another truth which is ex- 
tremely significant: 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 67 

A person who makes gestures toward 
himself is growing old. 

Have you ever noticed it? I mean the 
man who folds his arms. I mean the 
woman who curls her hands up in her lap. 
I mean the person who sits in a pulled-in 
attitude — as though he were trying to 
draw things into himself. He is old; 
subconsciously he sees himself compressed 
in a coffin. The man whose gestures are 
forthgoing, outward, extensive, is young. 
He is the master of life. He opens his 
arms as though he would take in the 
world — not to mention the girl with 
yellow hair. 

Look for a moment at your friends and 
acquaintances. 

If when they make a gesture away from 
themselves — an outward movement, a 
movement of extension — they do it nat- 
urally, be very sure that you can trust 
them. All good men make gestures away 
from themselves and all good women. 



68 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

When you see a woman whose gestures 
are toward herself, run for your life and 
your pocketbook and your immortal soul. 

And how wonderful she is, the woman 
who throws her hands out. The woman 
who does not fold her arms. All outward 
movements are those of joy, of pleasure, 
of achievement, of the things worth while. 
The woman who opens her arms is honest 
and gay and she expresses desire. Out- 
ward movements — of extension — are 
those of courage, faith, victory, honour, 
pride, liberty, altruism, optimism, health, 
wealth — they are the splendid gestures of 
wakefulness, of aliveness, of youth. And 
see how tragic a thing it is, when a woman 
throwing youth away, throwing away 
kindness and courage, folds her hands 
in upon herself, as one who should say: 
"I have nothing to give away — youth is 
gone — and what little I have left I must 
hug to my withered and selfish breasts." 

All movements where the flexion is 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 69 

toward one's self are movements of 
cowardice, of defeat and failure, of ava- 
rice, poverty, submission, and age. 

Just to-day, before I wrote this page, 
I saw a living instance of this thing. This 
page happened to be written in Rome. 
The Latin mind to-day had leapt toward 
riot and revolution. In the Piazza Vene- 
zia anarchy and order clashed. The 
police and the King's guards poured down 
through the old streets into the Piazza 
where the anarchists and strikers had 
gathered. It was the Queen's birthday. 
Over all the buildings in Rome floated 
the Royal flag and the anarchists halted 
the tramcars and refused to permit them 
to run unless they carried the red flag 
of their revolutionary protest. The sol- 
diers and police charged down upon the 
hysterical group of revolutionaries and 
beat them with the flats of their swords — 
in the way order has. At last the old 
Roman populace took a hand. It drove 



70 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

in between revolution and order; and 
swept the contestants apart. Then a 
curious thing happened. The populace 
seemed to incarnate itself in one man. 
He was typically Roman. He was forty; 
perhaps he was fifty; he had a large black 
moustache and a large belly; and he threw 
out his arms in a gesture wide as the 
Piazza Venezia; wide as Rome; wide as 
the Sabine hills; and he shouted: "Oh, 
stop this nonsense! Let everybody do 
as they want to. You soldiers take your 
Royal flag; you anarchists follow your red 
flag; meanwhile, we'll ride in the tram." 
And with a gesture ample as liberty, 
extensive as his fat arms would permit, 
he took Rome into his confidence. Calmly 
he climbed into a tramcar, the rest of 
us who made up the Roman populace 
followed his example, and the trams began 
to run. It was not what he said; it was 
his wide-flung gesture of sanity and 
courage; and the revolution came to an 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 71 

end. And coming home in the gray of 
the evening, when disorder still rioted 
in other streets, I took refuge in an 
old church — an old, old church built 
long ago. It was in the Corso; a dim 
church, lighted only with candles; and I 
saw an old woman kneeling. She was 
drawn in upon herself. Her head was 
pulled in between her shoulders. Her 
knees were bent and she was doubled up 
upon herself in the terrified attitude of an 
unborn child. Every movement that 
stirred her old body ran inward; she was 
as effigy of dolour, submission, prayer. 
And just as the man who checked the riot 
was eternal youth, so the woman who 
prayed was death. 

When people assert themselves their 
gestures are outgoing; and when people 
submit, cringe, beg, give up, their ges- 
tures are ingoing, inclusive, bonded. 

No beggar can spread his hands out 
amply and beg successfully. 



72 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Exteriorization is youthfulness — it is 
persistence, courage, victory. 

Interiorization is a confession of defeat 
and old age — it is begging somebody to 
be good to you and not go knocking you 
about the head. 

I wonder whether you remember two 
statues in Paris. One was by Bartholome. 
It is his monument Aux Morts. His 
purpose was to represent in marble the 
maximum of defeat — of death. And what 
he did was to carve the figure of a woman 
doubled in upon herself; her head touch- 
ing her knees in the concentric curve of 
the foetus. The other one is Rodin's 
"Spring." His symbol also is a woman. 
But she urges up in a violent curve which 
throws out her young body almost into a 
half circle — her head and her heels like 
the two ends of a bow of which her young, 
lithe body, thrown far outward, forms 
the arc. 

Outwardness — extension. 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 73 

Those figures of victory, of youth, and 
achievement on the Arc de Triomphe 
in Paris are all throwing their arms out 
in eternal gestures'of extension. 

Don't fall in on yourself. Bend back- 
ward. Throw your chest out. Open 
yourself to the world. The backbone that 
begins to curve over frontward is a sign 
that its possessor has abnegated youth. 

I hate to go back to these unhappy 
people on the New England farm who 
are the prototypes of age, but it is hor- 
ribly true that the farmer's backbone 
curves the wrong way. He bends for- 
ward, while his brother of the city defends 
himself against decay by keeping his 
backbone erect; he affirms his Ego by 
standing up, armed for the struggle of 
life, ready for attack or defence. 

(City people do not stoop. That is 
why they are young. World over the 
peasant and the country-fold creep about 
with bent spines; and they are old.) 



74 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

It is all right to carry your age well. 
That is very good; but what you want 
is to make your age carry you. Now so 
far as the physical body is concerned, 
all you have to do is to make the physical 
movements you like to make, so long 
as they are outward movements — move- 
ments away from yourself. I can put it in 
a nut-shell: 

The centre of your body is the eleventh 
vertebra of the spinal column. Think 
of that as your physical centre and make 
all your movements away from it. 

When you feel that you want exercise 
of any kind, take it; and never take any 
exercise unless you feel you want it. Any 
kind of exercise that pleases you, so long 
as it is not exercise toward yourself, 
is all right. It is all right upon the one 
condition that you do not take it alone. 
Any exercise taken in the secret of a 
closed room defeats the purpose for 
which you take it. Indeed man who 



PHYSICAL YOUTH 75 

isolates himself for any purpose what- 
soever is usually engaged in crime, either 
physical, mental, or moral. 

Think it over. 

You have never wilfully isolated your- 
self — driving even a woman out of your 
room — except in order to think or act a 
crime. Your physical vibrations are per- 
sonal to you, but unless they are received 
by another human being they return 
and react upon you poisonously. That 
is the peril of doing things in solitude. 

The man who plays alone, drinks alone, 
takes his exercise alone, does anything 
alone, is building for himself a habit of 
isolation, and this same isolation means 
old age, decrepitude; the throwing away 
of that measure of youthfulness which is 
his due. 

To live alone, to play alone, to work 
alone, to pray alone, is to be old. 

You can carry on in a persistent state 
of youthfulness just so long as your 



76 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

vibrations — your radio active vibrations 
— flow out from you and are received 
harmoniously by the vibrations of your 
fellow-men and your fellow-women. If 
you want to maintain youth, you cannot 
shake hands with too many men; you 
cannot kiss too many women. 



CHAPTER VI 
Emotional and Mental Youth 

IT WAS in the Grand Hotel in Rome. 
Every one who is any one had dined 
there. We were sitting over the little 
cups of black coffee in the foyer. The 
Sicilian princess passed in a new evening 
gown which showed us more of her back 
than we had yet seen; but the Sicilian 
princess did not disturb our after dinner 
tranquillity. And then, suddenly, in some 
way the atmosphere cracked as though 
an electric storm had broken. Mathilde 
Serao had entered. It is not alone that 
the great Neapolitan novelist is large 
and majestic and vibrant; that she wears 
the widest hat with the tallest plumes; 
that she smokes a long black cigar, and 
gesticulates extensively. It is more than 

77 



78 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

all that she radiates a force of nature 
comparable to Vesuvius in eruption. Her 
laughter is large and generous; her voice 
shakes the windows; where Mathilde 
Serao is, the sun shines and the winds 
blow. 

Is she beautiful? 

You can't imagine a young sculptor 
running after her beseeching her to 
pose for his statue of Venus. Her body 
is round and thick as a tree. (I know she 
eats too much maccaroni; I wish she 
wouldn't.) She is not beautiful. She is 
something better. She is alive. She ra- 
diates light and heat. She radiates joy. 
Merely to look at her yonder across the 
room, waving her fat white hand, smok- 
ing the big cigar, shouting, rolling her R's 
like the rolling of a drum, is to take a 
lesson in loving existence; and she made 
all of us — idling there in the foyer of the 
Grand — in love with life. 

She was so victoriously happy herself 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 79 

that she made everyone round her happy. 
You didn't have to be within fifty feet 
of her to hear what she said. Her con- 
versation — stormy as the sea — splashed 
its waves and foam clear across the room. 
And she talked about everything. Every- 
thing interested her — the social question, 
writers, women, politics, Petrograd, Paris. 
She dipped herself in the interests of 
humanity. According to the almanac 
Mathilde Serao should be old. But you 
might as well call Vesuvius old. That 
big, ample body is no nearer old age 
than are her vehement emotions, or the 
active mind winged with youth that 
flies abroad throughout the world of 
thought. 

Do you see the point I would make? 

There is harmony between the vibra- 
tions of her physical body and the gener- 
ous vibrations of heart and brain. It is 
harmony of a tremendously active sort, 
I admit; but harmony does not mean 



80 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

quietude; a tempest may be just as 
harmonious as a rosebud. 

You may have learned in the previous 
chapter just how necessary it is that 
your physical body should be given the 
kind of pleasant exercise it likes. There 
is something inside that long white body 
of yours which must also be given the 
exercise it needs. If your emotional 
nature is starved and grows anemic, you 
will tumble over into old age, though your 
outer body be strong as that of a bull or a 
red heifer. In order to keep your emo- 
tional nature right you need the right 
kind of emotional exercise. Exercise, 
you observe, not indulgence. You must 
exercise your emotions and your feelings 
and your imagination as wisely as you 
exercise your muscles. Youthfulness in 
the emotional body must be maintained 
by well-chosen and sympathetic exer- 
cises. Just what emotional exercises will 
best fit your case I shall describe in a 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 81 

later chapter. Here, I am trying to make 
clear the general law which you must 
follow. 

In the first place, I should like to lay 
heavy emphasis upon the statement 
that you should not indulge your emotion 
alone, in solitude. You are part of a great 
vibratory world; emotional as well as 
physical. From one body to the other 
throughout the universe there radiates 
a force comparable to heat or light, which 
binds into a unity all mankind. Modern 
scientists — like Boirac and Joire and 
Gaston Durville — can measure for you 
these inter-human vibrations. They can 
measure your personal vibration and that 
of John Smith, your neighbour, and tell 
you how your vibration reacts upon his. 
And the grave fact they will add is, that by 
shutting yourself off from the human vibra- 
tion of your contemporaries in life you are 
killing yourself precisely as a tree is killed 
when it is isolated from water and sun. 



82 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

I have no intention of going into the 
scientific side of this question. I would 
only draw from it a conclusion. Your 
emotional nature can maintain its nor- 
mal, unaging condition only when you 
let it play with the emotional natures 
of your kin and your friends, and those 
who come close to you in life. The 
wider your circle of friends and acquaint- 
ances — provided only they are emotion- 
ally alive — the more will your emotional 
nature find to strengthen it and build 
it up. 

Music feeds the emotional body. 

I do not mean that you have to go 
rolling about in the turbid floods of 
Wagnerian music, which was thought 
quite the right thing to do a generation 
ago, but which seems rather silly to-day. 
There are other kinds. Debussy, for 
instance, took the silliness out of music. 
You might like that. But for everyone 
there is a kind of music that reacts 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 83 

pleasantly on the emotional body. It 
may be some old song the English chil- 
dren sing: "Sally go Round the Moon/' 
or "Green Gravel/ ' It may be "Au 
clair de la lune," or it may be the dis- 
aster of a jazz band. But those sound- 
waves — if you find the wave-length that 
suits you — feed the emotional body. 

I call your attention to music especially 
because it differs from all the other arts. 
It is the only art which is mobile. All 
the others are fixed in immobility. And 
it is the most powerful of the arts in its 
emotional reaction, because it is closest 
to animal life. Long before birth takes 
place — men of that science will tell you — 
the education of hearing begins; and this 
education in the perception of sound is 
common to all animals and not alone to 
man. Thence comes the strange truth 
that music is the only art which affects 
an animal. Animals pay no attention 
to painting or sculpture or architecture; 



84 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

one and all they are attracted by music 
precisely as men are. 

It is therefore the animal side in man 
which is stirred by music. 

Highly intellectual men and women 
who have specialized their mentalities are 
rarely swayed by music. Music lovers 
are always nearer the emotional status 
of animals; and the danger of over- 
indulgence in the sensations which come 
from reiterated shocks of sound-waves is 
to be reckoned with. 

Poets may die young as the saying is; 
but music-drunkards grow old before 
their time — from over-indulgence. The 
danger is from excess. The danger is 
from specializing. And the over-indulged 
emotional nature is swollen and deformed 
like the liver of a Strassbourg goose. 

Of course, taken in the right way, 
sound- vibrations are the very food of the 
animal-soul. Music is good. Song is 
good. Dancing is good. All things 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 85 

rhythmic are good. Therefore don't be 
afraid of falling in love. Falling in love 
never hurt any one. Of course I insist 
that you shall keep your morals right. 
I don't want you to run about kissing the 
upper-housemaid or jumping over your 
neighbour's fence. Love and Be Goodl 
But you can hardly do too much loving. 
Love your neighbours; and remember 
that your neighbours stretch away as 
far as the horizon. All humanity is 
your neighbour. There is a lot of cant 
talked above love; and one of our Puritan 
inheritances is a kind of terror of letting 
our emotions go. Life will go more 
smoothly and carry on further when 
men and women love each other with a 
franker disregard for minor jealousies 
and angers; love is the great prophylactic 
against old age. 

And you must let light in upon your 
emotional body unless you want it to 
wither; you must let colour in. Your 



86 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

rooms should be full of colour and beauty. 
When the women of your house come 
down to dinner they should be dressed in 
beautiful garments; jewels should shine 
in their hair; and your slim, normal body 
should be fitly garbed to meet them. 

Music, pictures, the exquisite works 
of art 

And remember in loving pictures you 
do not have to love the Old Masters. 
Indeed don't love the Old Masters. Love 
the Young Masters who are creating the 
beauty of the day. There can be no 
art too advanced for the woman who 
refuses to abnegate youth. The woman 
living in the present — as she must live 
if she is to go on being young— need 
not get her thrills from the frescoes of 
the Middle Ages. What the art of to- 
day has to tell her it is telling in terms 
of Cubism and of Futurism; and Dadaism 
if you will. 

In other words, there is no art too new 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 87 

for the person who is living and being 
young. 

It is all right to be historically faithful 
to the Old Masters, but the New Masters 
have vibrations of music or colour or 
form that means youth. Why do you 
think society goes in for novelties — for 
the latest thing in the seven arts? Be- 
cause it is smart? Not a bit of it. Be- 
cause it realizes that Matisse and Van- 
gogh and Guaguin are bringing them if 
not new vision at all events new attitudes 
of mind. Fads and fancies; Russian 
dances, French music — all that is new 
jogs the emotions out of their sluggish 
calm — sets them spinning and makes for 
youth. In your quest for perpetual youth 
you cannot afford to grow emotionally 
sluggish. You cannot afford to be static. 
You cannot go on mooning over the poets 
you loved at twenty. You have got to 
sway with the emotion of the latest poet 
who is posturing in the moonlight. You 



88 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

have got to key your emotions up to his. 
You must dance to the latest fiddler's 
tune. 

In fact, you should dance, both figura- 
tively and in reality. Dancing has a 
double value. It is really a pleasant 
way of exercising the physical body; and 
in the second place it frees the psychic 
vibrations and gives the emotional body 
a chance. It is a way of being young. 

And now just here I want to call at- 
tention to the danger you have possibly 
already thought of in this matter of 
exercising the emotions. One does not 
want to overdo the thing. Proper limits 
should be set for falling in love; the nor- 
mal man should not go wantoning about 
like an underbred school-boy. There is 
a danger as has been said in giving way 
to musical vibrations. That is why 
almost all musicians are abnormal. Their 
emotional bodies are puffed out and 
covered with excrescences. They are 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 89 

deformed, just as bad-living men are 
deformed by too much food and drink. 
And the normal man should show just as 
much moderation in his dancing, for 
instance, as he would in his eating. An 
elderly gaga skipping about a ballroom 
with fluffy immaturity makes for derision. 

Keep to the norm! 

In your play of emotions, just as in 
your physical game. If you indulge your 
emotional nature too much, you run the 
risk of becoming either a musician or 
possibly a poet. These are all right but 
not for normal people. Still, when you 
are studying an art so subtle as that of 
keeping young, you can occasionally get a 
good suggestion even from the people who 
push physical exercise to the extreme as 
the athletes do; or from those who slop 
over emotionally, like the musicians. 

You have often observed that the actor 
in his exaggerated, rather humorous way, 
really preserves a large measure of youth. 



90 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

He does it, I think, by the emotional 
exercise of playing parts and also by 
drinking in the vibrations of friendliness 
that come back to him from an applauding 
audience. He more than any one else is 
worth studying for the youthfulness he 
keeps alive. And the really good woman 
who wants to be young could study 
actresses, noting especially that it is the 
wide range of their emotional experiences 
that keeps them young. 

The actor is the man who, by the wise 
and judicious co-exercise of his physical, 
emotional, and mental elements, keeps 
himself triumphantly young long after 
other men of his generation have given 
up; and if I were asked honestly to state 
whether among the eternally young 
women I have known the greater number 
were found among actresses, or society 
women, I should have to hesitate to give 
an answer. Perhaps the best answer 
would be this: More smart women have 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 91 

kept young; but the reason is that the 
proportion of smart women to actresses is 
a hundred to one. And there is not a 
smart woman living and loving and being 
happy at fifty who has not made more or 
less of a study of some splendid actress, 
who convinced her that to be old before 
eighty or a hundred is a crime against 
nature. I wonder if Fanny Ward will 
permit me to say that her example in this 
respect has made hundreds of women 
young in spite of the years. 

But do not overplay the emotional side 
of life. You might wake up some morn- 
ing (with horror) and find yourself — a 
poet. And that's the sort of thing no 
right-minded man wants to happen to him 
overnight. 

And while you are preserving your 
physical and mental equilibrium do not 
let your mind get old. A static mind 
means old age. Mental inertia is the 
most dangerous enemy to the tranquil 



92 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

well being of the trillion cells which should 
all be working in harmony to keep you 
young. 

Perhaps in latter-day life the danger is 
not so much of mental inertia as of men- 
tal over-work. More and more we tend 
to over-play the intellectual part of life. 
There is, to be sure, a good deal of pretence 
in our assumption of omnipotence. We 
do not know quite as much as we pretend 
to know — not even the youngest of us. 
This sort of general knowledge — knowl- 
edge of parade — which comes from maga- 
zines and newspapers is not the kind that 
makes for brain-fatigue. But just as the 
athlete breaks the equilibrium of life in 
favour of his muscles and just as the 
emotionalist of music breaks that equi- 
librium to build up a flabby emotional 
body, so the pedant pays away his youth 
to create an abnormal brain. The hu- 
man motor must run on all its cylinders if 
it is to run smoothly on through time. 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 93 

I do not suppose you are going to be a 
professor of archaeology, or an expert on 
parthenogenesis, or the parasitic inocula- 
tor of psychic maladies. If you were 
you probably wouldn't be reading this 
book. Let us be quite frank. Scholar- 
ship is not smart. Why? Because with 
that instinct which serves it so well in- 
stead of thought or study, the smart set 
has learned that the studious sort of life 
makes for premature old age. It does. 
You can't bend over medieval manu- 
scripts in the library at Venice — your feet 
in woollen shoes to keep from freezing — 
without pulling down on your head the 
whiteness and wrinkles of old age. You 
cannot steam in the laboratory without 
giving up a part of your youthfulness. Is 
it worth the sacrifice? Of course it is — 
just as children are worth it; and mothers 
and fathers will go on sacrificing their 
youth on that high and holy altar. But 
other books (and I have written some of 



94 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

them) exist for these noble people — for 
these martyrs of parental love and patient 
scholarship and high-minded science and 
altruistic devotion to all the great causes. 

Here and now we are concerned with 
other things. 

We are concerned with people who want 
to keep young — to get the best out of life 
— to carry on so strongly that they can 
help themselves and help others splen- 
didly, until the clock strikes one hundred 
and twelve; and it is time to go decently 
(and for the first time alone) into one's 
bedroom, to draw the curtains, and make 
one's last preparation for the night's 
sleep. 

Those three parts of you whereof I have 
spoken must each have their due develop- 
ment. If you move your arms and legs 
and give the body the movement it re- 
quires; if you move your emotions about 
and exercise your capacities for love and 
laughter and emulation; so you must give 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 95 

your mind all the active thoughts it needs 
to keep it young. But you must not 
hitch it to the cart of science or scholar- 
ship and make it haul a load. 

And just as you want new emotions 
you want new thoughts. It is novelty 
that keeps the mind young. You want 
to know everything that is going on in the 
world of thought. You can't be a scien- 
tist, but you want to know what he, in 
his curious way, is doing; and you want to 
know the kind of books the literary man 
is writing. One doesn't want to read bad 
literature. One hasn't time for anything 
but the best of its kind. One must know 
what the smart people are reading in 
London or Paris or Rome, because those 
are precisely the books that keep one's 
mind in an attitude of youth. They 
startle the mind and keep it alert, while 
the old familiar books are narcotics. 

One must live in an atmosphere of 
youngness. And the newest books and 



96 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

the newest plays, even as the newest 
paintings and the newest music, radiate 
the vibrations of youth. They will pull 
you up abreast of your youngest con- 
temporary; and it is in him and his 
struggles you must take an interest if you 
are not to fall back into the dust of old 
things. 

Above all you must be unselfish, because, 
mixing among human beings as I have 
urged you to do, demands that you give 
more than you get. 

You must give out or nothing will come 
to you. And what you really want to 
get from the world of nice people who 
know how to play is the magnificent 
gift of youth. Therefore you must have 
a general interest in life. You can't be a 
hobbyist; you can't go along on one line; 
you must give yourself a universal chance 
to be young— in flesh, feeling, thought. 

Three things then: 

I. The basis of physical youth is move- 



EMOTIONAL YOUTH 97 

ment — movements that are pleasurable; 
therefore do not let your body become 
static; for the moment it stands still it 
is aging, crumbling, dying. 

II. You must not yield to emotional 
sluggishness, which means decay, or to 
emotional over-indulgence, which means 
flabby abnormality, such as you see in 
music drunkards, in mediums, in those 
who use such narcotics as ether and 
morphine. 

III. You must beware of mental inertia 
on the one hand and of specialized over- 
development on the other. 

Do not break the equilibrium of life. 



CHAPTER VII 
Classifications of Character 

THERE are many ways of classifying 
humanity. 
One may classify men according to the 
shape of their skulls, or the pigment in 
skin and hair. Or one may classify them 
according to their moral attitudes. In- 
deed there are innumerable methods of 
sub-dividing and labelling humankind. 
The method which lends itself best to 
scientific sub-division is that of classifying 
men according to their aptitude for fitting 
into the environing organisation of 
society. In other words, you judge a man 
by the way he adapts himself to the 
collectivity in which he lives. 

The agent of adaptation to the social 
environment is character. 

98 



CHARACTER 99 

Therefore one cannot do better than 
divide mankind into three classes, accord- 
ing to their reaction to the social environ- 
ment. Your scientist will call this the 
reaction to psychic suggestion. 

The consensus of scientific opinion gives 
the three classes as follows: 

Class I. Affirmative. 

Class II. Receptive. 

Class III. Passive. 

Everywhere, from the nursery where 
your children play up to the White House 
where Power sits like a symbol, you will 
find examples of these classes. They 
are easily recognized; but I am going to 
give you in as simple a way as possible 
the rules whereby you may know them 
unmistakably. You cannot conduct your 
own life wisely, you cannot help others 
along the road, unless you know your 
own class and your own type and the 
classes and types of others. 

To find in what class you belong; to 



100 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

find in what class your daughter and 
your son and your friends belong, will 
not require deep study. More than any- 
thing else it demands judgment. You 
must first know your own character and 
then place yourself without hypocrisy 
in the class or sub-class to which you be- 
long. You will note many variations 
from type. We are not all shaped in the 
same mould. Each of us has individual 
peculiarities which lead us a trifle away 
from the pure type. Therefore, in order 
that you may have the benefit of your 
own comments and study, I have left 
blank spaces in the chapter on rules so 
you may jot down memoranda of the 
minor divergencies from type which you 
may note in yourself, your family, or 
your friends. 

There will be variations from type as 
I have said, but broadly there is not a 
human being at all approximating the 
norm, who will not (relatively) fit into 



CHARACTER 101 

one of these divisions or sub-divisions. 
And when you have found your place 
— or his place, or the place of Marie- 
Louise — you have nothing to do but to 
follow the laws of life laid down for each 
type and sub-type, in order to carry on 
through the long years with pleasure to 
yourself and profit to those in your social 
milieu. 

I hope you will clearly understand that 
this book, though it is written for men and 
women, applies to children. It is not 
only to teach the adult how to maintain 
his adult youthfulness; it is also to show 
the adult how the little generation grow- 
ing up in the nursery may be unconsciously 
initiated into the secret of a life that is 
long and ever young. Of course the first 
thought in my mind has been of the 
women I know and of the men who are 
throwing youth away. But nothing can 
be true for the adult which is not more 
compellingly true for the adolescent. The 



102 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

mothers who apply the principles herein 
set down in definite rules to their children 
— no matter how young — will be laying 
the corner-stone for the longevity of the 
coming race. They will not be playing 
with a fad; they will be applying to 
practical and race-preserving ends the 
gravest wisdom of the latest scientific 
thought. For adults detailed advice 
would be almost superfluous. They have 
but to read the page and take its lesson. 
But for the application of these rules for 
children a wider explanation is necessary. 
You can plan long, youth-bearing lives 
for your children; you can increase 
their longevity even as you can maintain 
your own youth through the years. But 
what you can do for yourself with ease 
and with pleasure requires in the case of 
children much care, much thoughtfulness, 
and wisdom. For parents who want 
their children to live long and be young 
the first rule is this: 



CHARACTER 103 

Never try to change a child and make 
him over into someone else. 

Never try to turn him into what he 
isn't by hammering into him character- 
istics he does not possess. There is no 
reason why he should be like his brother 
or his sister or any one but himself. Above 
all, there is no reason why little Willie 
should be like his father, though that is 
about the last thing a father ever recog- 
nizes. And why should Kate be like 
her mother? Surely one like Kate's 
mother is enough. Remember that Kate 
is essentially herself. She can't grow 
into anything but Catherine, keeping all 
her Kate qualities. The same thing is 
true of your boy and every boy. If 
Rupert is born lazy do not force him to 
follow and emulate those of his family 
who were not born lazy. 

His essential strength lies in his inactivity. 

That very inactivity which you foolishly 
deplore. 



104 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

It is very probable that things will 
come to this boy because he sits still — 
and things know where to find him; 
while the active lad will have to go out 
and hunt things out for himself. 

One boy in your family may be keen 
on active sports; there is no reason why 
the other boy— his brother— shouldn't 
sit and look on. 

Let him look on. 

Do not force a child into uncongenial 
play — especially do not force him into un- 
congenial work. If he prefers books to foot- 
ball give him books. Nature will take care 
of him to a large extent. Of course he 
needs your guiding, but he needs your in- 
telligent guiding, Here is the great truth: 

He cannot develop along lines contrary 
to his type; and he should not. 

Only an ignorance of human nature, 
so dense that it is almost criminal, would 
attempt to force a child's development 
along lines contrary to type. 



CHARACTER 105 

Your first duty to the adolescent is to 
let him be himself; to let him perfect 
himself according to his definite character; 
to let him run true to type. Boy or girl 
it is the same thing and adult duty is 
this: to find out what their types are and 
encourage them to do the utmost with 
the qualities nature and heredity have 
bestowed upon them. 

Every child has come into the world 
with sealed orders. That is why he is 
a mystery. 

You do not know what those sealed 
orders are; and he does not know. The 
best you can do is to judge of his mission 
by his character; and knowing that to 
help him on his way. The little man is an 
Individuality; the little girl is an Ego; 
they have predestined ways to go in 
spite of all you can do or say. Already 
their individualities are sticking out of 
them. Study their characteristics. In 
a broad general way you will find descrip- 



106 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

tions of them in the types herein set 
forth. When you find the child's type 
help build it up. Help that young body 
and brain to perfect its type by applying 
the rules that fit this particular case for 
the development physical, emotional, and 
mental. 

I do not mean that you are to take 
little Willie and stand him up and read 
these rules to him. It is your business 
to guide him so that he may unconsciously 
follow these rules. He need never know 
there are any. With a very little en- 
couragement he will naturally follow the 
line of least resistance — for him. For 
his normal desire is to find a way of 
harmonizing his vibrations with his sur- 
roundings; and his development along 
every line will be enormous, because noth- 
ing will be opposing him. Try it. And 
in six months you won't know the child, 
so greatly will he have gained from this 
sane and scientific method of guiding 



CHARACTER 107 

adolescence into maturity while preserv- 
ing all the factors of youth. 

But remember this: it is never the child 
who can decide upon its own type. 

There your wisdom is needed. Were 
he allowed to follow his own bent he 
would listen probably to his more vehe- 
ment instincts. He would hearken to 
the call from the cave. 

And civilization is nothing more or less 
than a collective effort to bring under 
control these cave-dweller instincts for the 
good of the collectivity. You can't trust 
the instincts and appetites of childhood 
to make for that collective good which 
is civilization — or for the good of the 
child. Your wisdom, as I have said, is 
needed. But education — physical, moral, 
or mental — if it is to develop the child 
instead of thwarting him, must be in 
harmony with his instincts and must be 
in line with his type. 

Of course it is often incumbent upon 



108 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

adolescence to do things it does not 
particularly want to do. Unfortunately, 
much of its life has to be against the 
grain. This is the essence of training — 
of education;, but the best training and 
the best education are those which col- 
laborate as much as possible with the 
inherent characteristics and desires; and 
oppose them as least may be. 

And it is not going to make a child 
selfish to give him his own way if you 
are sure — quite sure — that the way he 
wants to go is the way laid down for him 
by the nature with which he was born. 
You are not going to make any one unsel- 
fish by forcing upon them uncongenial 
tasks or thwarting them in the things 
they most want to do. You will only 
make them old before their time; old, old. 
You will only teach them to live and grow 
old and unhappy and warped and dolor- 
ous. The soil youth grows best in is 
that of love and harmony; love from 



CHARACTER 109 

others and harmony with its surroundings 
and with itself. 

These few words upon the application 
of youthful living had to get themselves 
written; and now if you will, I shall de- 
scribe the three classes into which modern 
scientists have divided the human race : 

Three classes, then: 

Passive, Receptive, and Affirmative. 

Picture to yourself humanity as an 
immense congregation of folk engaged in 
running a mighty race. The pistol cracks 
and they start from the line. For a 
moment they are all together. Then a 
little group detaches itself from the 
others, advances, and sweeps on swiftly 
toward the goal. This little group in 
advance makes up hardly five per cent, 
of all humanity. Science will tell you 
that it is the equivalent of the psychic 
brain. It is the thinking brain of hu- 
manity, the active brain, the governing 
brain. They are the Affirmatives. 



110 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Look once more out on the field where 
the runners are still panting on. There 
is a second group still pressing toward 
the goal. It makes up about twenty 
per cent, of humanity. Will it win? At 
all events it will run. Those who are 
running in the second group, struggling 
on, are best described as Receptives. 
Once more the scientist will tell you that 
they are equivalent to the Occipito- 
frontal brain; they are sensitivo-psychic; 
in a word, they are the emotional and 
impulsive part of humanity. 

Far behind, scattered here and there, 
crumbled out all over the field, are the 
remaining seventy-five per cent, of those 
who willy-nilly have engaged in the race. 
And once more the scientists will tell you 
that they are equivalent to the occipital 
brain; they are the sheep of humanity. 

Let us look a trifle more closely at these 
classes. And since you have in mind a 
picture of the Passives losing the race 



CHARACTER 111 

they are set to run, let us begin with 
them. 

How do the Passives react and to what? 

They react only to a direct command, 
because they are impotent to originate 
personal action. They follow and, wher- 
ever difficulty and responsibility confront 
them, they stop. Here is an obstacle. 

It stands up like a mountain; and the 
Passive must climb over it. What does 
he do? He looks at the mountain and 
he seems to hear it issue an order; and 
the order issued by the mountain is this: 

"I am an obstacle; you can't get over 
me." 

And the Passive will stand there con- 
fronting the obstacle until you, or some- 
one else, speaks the word of command — 
of power and authority — saying: 

"Go climb the mountain." 

And just as passively as he stood still, 
with equal passivity, he will climb the 
mountain. 



112 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

The Passive reacts to a direct com- 
mand: "Do it. I order it. Go." 

Second: The Receptive is a different 
sort of person. He is sensitive, so is she. 
They haven't much confidence in them- 
selves. They don't know just what they 
can do. They are afraid to act for fear 
they may not be able to succeed. They 
are very sweet, undecided people and they 
instinctively attach themselves to the 
strong. 

But they are not Passive. 

They want to follow though they 
hesitate before a responsibility. It is as 
though they were confessing to themselves 
that they are not fit: to lead. But they 
have faith. They give themselves to 
noble causes, not passively, but under 
the persuasive influence of others: 

All you have to do is to give them confi- 
dence in themselves. 

They react to the persuasive suggestion: 
"Oh, you can do it." 



CHARACTER 113 

You never want to startle the Recep- 
tees with a command, with an imperative : 
"Do it." That makes them run away 
and hide themselves in a cloud of timidity 
and sensitiveness and doubt. If you give 
them the persuasive suggestion: "Why, 
you can do it," they at once grow confi- 
dent and sure of themselves. For them 
as for the Passives the obstacle rises like 
a mountain and tells them it is too terrible 
to be crossed. But the kindly suggestion : 
"You can do it," gives them a force 
often as great as the noble five per cent, 
you saw winning the race. 

Indeed among those who have done 
most for humanity, among those who 
have fought many a good fight and won 
many a good race, as the Apostle said, 
were great numbers of these sensitive and 
Receptive people, who by kindly guidance 
and loving suggestion gained such self- 
confidence that they became unconquer- 
able. 



114 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

And now we come to the Affirmatives. 
The five per cent. The winners of the race. 

It is a curious thing about this strong 
man; it is a curious thing about this 
splendid and formidable woman. They 
are wonderful people. They are inde- 
pendent. They are always contradicting 
you. They can't help it. It is in their 
nature. If you say softly that two and 
two are four, their first thought is as to 
how they can whip up some argument 
that will convince you that two and two 
are five. Obstacles delight them. They 
like to do difficult things because they are 
difficult. They enjoy the battle of facts 
and ideas. 

Never order the Affirmative to do any- 
thing on earth. 

Not even the things they want most to 
do. They are made to command and it 
goes horribly against the grain to obey. 
If you say to them abruptly: "Go" — 
their first thought is to back up the other 



CHARACTER 115 

way; and if you try to deal with them as 
you would with the Receptives and sug- 
gest persuasively: "Why, you can do it," 
they merely smile a tolerant smile. Far 
better than you do they know what 
power lies within them. These forceful 
people react, curiously enough, only to 
one suggestion. If you express doubt; 
if you intimate that the obstacle is too 
big to surmount; if, in short, you say: 
"Oh, you'll never be able to do it," those 
cantankerous Affirmatives will strut for- 
ward and do it or die. 

It was because Columbus was told he 
couldn't find a new world that he went 
and found one. In the speech he de- 
livered at the Italian Parliament last year 
in Rome, President Wilson unconsciously 
defined exactly this type of the Affirma- 
tive man; and he said: 

"The only effect an obstacle produces 
on a brave man is to summon up his 
courage as though in answer to a de- 



116 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

fiance. We owe it to our pride to con- 
quer difficulties." 

I should not like to be the one to say- 
to Mr. Wilson: "Do this." 

And with him, I do not think one would 
accomplish much with the Persuasive 
suggestion: "Oh, you really can, you 
know. " But an unfailing way to get that 
man to do the thing you want done would 
be to tell him he can't do it. Though the 
mountain towered cloud-high, he would 
do it. He would brook no defiance from 
mountain or man, because he is a highly 
developed Affirmative. 

Broadly, all normal people fall into these 
three classes which I have described. 
Many sub-divisions might be made. 
Science has defined various sub-types. 
Doctor Baraduc has defined precisely 
forty minor types. 

Here at Rome many little revolutions 
flare out in the streets. It has been in- 
teresting to study some of the violent 



CHARACTER 117 

types — the so-called Revolutionaries. 
They belong to a distinct sub-type. They 
form part of the group of Receptives 
whose sensitiveness is very great. Now 
their sensitiveness has revolted against 
the imperative Will which has been laid 
upon them by old law and order. What 
happens? They rush violently out of 
their Receptive and Submissive or Pas- 
sive class and try to climb up into the 
class of the Affirmatives. They can't 
do it! No one of them can do it. His 
characteristics with which he came into 
the world are those of the twenty per 
cent. But it is very interesting to ob- 
serve that these violent runaways from 
the Receptive class to which they be- 
long always group themselves together. 
They try to find a refuge from their in- 
dividual weakness by uniting with others 
of the weak revolutionary type. They 
form gangs; they form parties; and they 
attack the social organization, the family, 



118 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

or society, because their really sensitive 
natures have been brutalized or hurt by 
society and the family. 

It is well worth remembering that all 
the great political criminals — all the an- 
archists and revolutionaries — belong to 
this sentimental class; and they become 
violent and criminal when they attempt 
to be Affirmatives — making thus an ab- 
normal departure from type. 

It is just as with a child — an affection- 
ate child, sweet-tempered and sensitive — 
who may be driven into violence simply 
because you have applied to it the wrong 
suggestion. You have ordered it to do a 
thing instead of persuading it; or tried 
to persuade it when you should have 
given a command. 

Do you see the point? 

The hypocrites of the world belong to 
this same sensitive class. They have 
been forced into hypocrisy because wise 
guidance has not conducted them along 



CHARACTER 119 

the line they should rightly follow. Re- 
member that it is the family that creates 
tendencies; that gives suggestions. It 
is in the family that characters affirm 
themselves for good or ill. Unless a child 
is given the suggestions that belong to its 
character and type, it may be driven to 
disaster — it will certainly be thrown into 
a discordant life, which will mean a broken 
youth and and early death. 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Types of Humanity 

THESE types are those of men and 
women alike. I shall describe them 
broadly, giving you only the large outline 
based as they are upon the biometric 
studies of Doctor Baraduc. I could easily 
sub-divide them into his forty groups. 
My object, however, is only to show you 
the type en large — in a summary way. 
You will not find in them all the char- 
acteristics of your friend. Suppose, for 
example, he belongs to class 9. Not all 
the qualities I shall describe will be united 
in him, but still in a broad, general way 
he will resemble that forthgoing man who 
stands for the symbol of that type. When 
you study him you will observe many 

differences. But you will find that, on 
120 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 121 

the whole, his dominant characteristic — 
the ruling quality that makes him the 
man he is — will be that associated with 
type 9. 

The same thing is true of yourself. 
You will not find yourself described 
wholly in what is written about the type 
to which you belong, but you will find 
your keynote there. You will find there 
your essential vibration — the vibration 
to which you most readily answer. You 
must use not only your judgment but a 
perfectly honest critical sense. 

Now in the same way when you have 
found your type you will have to decide 
for yourself whether you belong to the 
Affirmative, to the Receptive or to the 
Passive class of this type. Your natural 
tendency will be immediately to declare 
that you are an Affirmative. Every man 
thinks well of himself. The one thing he 
considers properly distributed in this 
world is intellect, for invariably he is of 



122 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

the opinion that his intellect is the best 
one going. However, you may be mis- 
taken about that, you know. You may 
not really belong in the compelling in- 
tellectual class of the Affirmatives. Bet- 
ter consult your wife. She knows. 

And the same thing precisely is true 
for the woman who reads this book. She 
must find her type — the type to which she 
really belongs. And I should not advise 
her to trust wholly to her own judgment. 
I should suggest she consult her fiance 
or possibly her husband or — if she has the 
courage — her best woman friend. On the 
other hand, she may know. Women 
really know more about themselves than 
men do; and they are not so beastly vain. 
I think that most women — with fine hon- 
esty — will put themselves in the class of 
that type to which they rightfully belong. 

They will not hesitate — as perhaps 
mere men may — to ask those three fatidic 
questions, one after the other, as to what 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 123 

kind of a suggestion they react. Do they 
respond more readily to the blunt com- 
mand: 

"Doit." 

Can they be induced to do something 
by the persuasive suggestion: 

"I am sure you can do it." 

Or, can they only be forced to action by 
the appeal to pride and obstinacy con- 
tained in the suggestion: 

"You'll never be able to do it; you 
can't." 

If you will be perfectly honest in select- 
ing your type and placing yourself in the 
class where you belong, this book will do 
for you precisely what it has promised to 
do. It will teach you how to live and be 
young. 

TYPE ONE 

(Creative) 
These are the people of whom one says 
instinctively: "Quel beau gargon! Quelle 
jolie fille"; and they are usually hand- 



124 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

some folk, with the sunlight in their hair. 
They are magnanimous and they are 
religious; they even invent new religions, 
even as they invent new arts and new 
systems of government. They are good 
and generous; and since they are born to 
create, they are likely to create institu- 
tions and organizations for the good of 
humanity. They are charming people 
to work with because one can work with 
them. Those of this type are sentimental 
and romantic. They need love and they 
inspire both love and sympathy; and 
usually their love is beneficent. Socially 
they mix with all classes of people. Their 
bearing is dignified, noble, commanding; 
and they usually occupy positions of 
prominence in life. 

TYPE TWO 
(Maternal) 
This is a type of woman so beautiful 
she does not need to be clever. She is 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 125 

always tranquil. She ought always to be 
rich and happy, though somehow or 
other she doesn't know how to make a 
success of marriage. Perhaps it is be- 
cause she is an incoherent and fantastic 
sort of girl; rather timid, rather negligent, 
rather visionary, but with a very strong 
maternal instinct. There is a boy just 
like her. I have often wondered what 
would happen if he married her. I can 
imagine an adorable lot of milky-faced, 
irresponsible little babies mooning about 
their nursery. Life for them would be as 
absurd and fascinating as a fairy-tale. 
Type two rarely stays married, odd as it 
may seem. They are nomads. They 
love distance and music and poetry and 
flowers. They are capricious and fan- 
tastic. Their ideas never fit into each 
other in a decent, orderly way. They are 
usually too indolent to look after their 
own interests, but they are perfectly 
charming folk and one can't help loving 



126 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

them, though the serious-minded person 
is often tempted to violent measures of 
repression. They frequently write poetry 
and music of a dreamy sort. In their 
gentle way they are often stubborn, but 
only for a moment. Usually they cling 
and are acquiescent. 

TYPE THREE 
(Expansive) 
Those belonging to this type present 
themselves well. They have deportment. 
They like display and ostentation, es- 
pecially in their homes and surroundings. 
They are lovers of life; and never hard on 
themselves physically or morally. You 
can't make martyrs out of them, they 
won't let you. In a word, they are lovers 
of all good things including love — gay, 
talkative, careless, pompous, benevolent, 
kindly, honest, hating evil and loving 
good. But if you want to please them 
never forget to give them the centre of 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 127 

the stage and turn the lime light on 
them. You won't make them happy by 
electing them vice-president when there 
is a presidency in the offing. They are 
fond of good company, pretty women, 
jokes, and laughter; and their laughter 
rings out loud and clear. They can 
organize and command. Usually you find 
this type well up to the front in public 
affairs. Socially they are great favourites. 
They belong to many clubs and wherever 
you find them — men or women — they 
always occupy positions of prominence 
and command. 

TYPE FOUR 

(Material and Restrictive) 
Among your friends you may know a 
slow-walking, silent, serious man who 
looks down as he walks; who is not very 
fond of promiscuous company or frivolous 
conversation — one who listens rather than 
talks. You would fancy he came into the 



128 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

world already old and wise and perhaps a 
trifle sad. He is dark, rather than fair. 
He ofttimes stoops and his eyes are melan- 
choly. This is Type Four. He is pru- 
dent — even carries caution to an extreme; 
concealing his ambition and his secret love 
of wealth. A patient, persevering slow 
worker of the reliable kind, who never 
attempts any hardy enterprise — if he can 
help it. Somehow the earth attracts this 
type. They enjoy digging in it — even 
down into its mines. They like to plant 
trees, flowers, and erect solid buildings. 
Altogether the world would not get on 
very well without this type, which is 
perhaps as useful as any of those we have 
been studying; and it is unmistakable. 
You can tell them by their faithfulness, by 
their conscientious work, their love of 
detail. And they are always slow; and 
things come to them slowly, late rather 
than early in life. But what they gain 
they keep. There is nothing ephemeral in 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 129 

their success — it is of the solid and lasting 
kind. They not only love the earth and 
that which is hidden in it, but likewise 
old things — antiques — attract them. Re- 
served and secretive there is in the men 
and women of this type an immense force, 
which makes for conservatism and fidelity 
to accepted ideas. They are very hard to 
understand because they do not readily 
inspire sympathy; and never seek it. 
They are solitary. They build a shell for 
themselves, and it is hard for them to 
break through it. This type numbers 
many scholars, historians, and statisticians 
—never poets or imaginative writers. 
Ofttimes it creates misers. Even the rich- 
est have a tendency to save and to seek 
the shadow. 

TYPE FIVE 

(Activity) 

Do you know the woman who looks you 

square in the face with a smile on her 

rather thin mouth? I think she has a 



130 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

rather thin nose and very bright eyes. 
Anyway, she is adroit, intelligent, and 
ironic; and sometimes she is a bit mali- 
cious and she belongs to Type Five. All 
these people are really extraordinarily 
clever. They are good talkers — even elo- 
quent — and in business they are extremely 
shrewd. Personally, I am rather afraid of 
their immense cleverness. They may be 
planning to steal your sweetheart or pick 
your pocket; and, on the other hand, they 
may be planning nothing of the sort. 
One never knows. They keep you guess- 
ing. But they really do look at you with 
an air of such uncanny cleverness that you 
can't help suspecting them. It was only 
because the Welshman is so clever that 
people called Taffy a thief. Those of this 
class excel in business, politics, literature, 
and even art. They are quick of wit and 
quick of hand. They are the people who 
make the world go round; and sometimes 
they make it go round the wrong way. 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 131 

Anyhow they make it move. They are 
quick-moving, active, agile, talkative, 
eloquent, and persuasive. In appearance 
they are rather smart, elegant people and 
they are excellent teachers. It is natural 
that children should love them for they 
love children. Oddly enough they are 
often maids and bachelors and do not 
marry, or marry late. 

type six 
(Art, Luxury, and Beauty) 
In Type Six you will find all who were 
born to love and be young. They are 
the real lovers of the world. They always 
have a great deal of beauty. It would 
almost seem the Seven Arts had been 
specially created to please them, for they 
love everything that is beautiful. They 
are very artistic. They can sing, dance, 
act, paint — and instinctively, in dress, in 
their homes, they evince faultless taste. 
They love colour, beauty, art, luxury, 



132 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

love — especially love. They are more 
loving than faithful it must be confessed. 
But this does not detract from the irre- 
sistible charm of this most charming type. 
They adore their homes and yet in their 
voluptuous way they enjoy travel, sight- 
seeing, everything that stimulates their 
rich emotional nature. These people are 
slow to anger, but sometimes when roused 
they become very passionate — almost 
violent, but they are not really violent. 
You will meet real violence in Type Nine. 
No, they lack persistency in anger just as 
they lack fortitude in suffering or mis- 
fortune. They are an artistic, beautiful, 
and romantic type and society loves them. 
Indeed of all the types this is the most 
ornamental — men or women. If you 
want to please a Six Type send her 
flowers and flowers and flowers; and she 
won't be very angry if you scatter a few 
diamonds among them; in fact, she might 
persuade herself she was in love with you, 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 133 

which would be quite true — for the mo- 
ment. So far as love is concerned the Six 
Type is rather quick on the trigger. A 
man of this type will instinctively lean 
toward art and beauty. He will, him- 
self, be very handsome and will delight 
in making life as beautiful as it can be 
made. You will find many of the famous 
dancers — men and women— in Type Six. 
But for all their dainty charm those who 
belong to Type Six are voluptuous and 
material in their instincts and in their 
lives. 

TYPE SEVEN 

(Poetical and Musical) 
The girl who plays the harp — there are 
still a few girls who do play the harp — or 
the ukulele, or the mandolin, or some 
stringed instrument and who is as frail 
as the music she draws from the strings, 
belongs to Type Seven. Not exception- 
ally strong in mentality, this type has a 
wonderful fund of sensitive imagination; 



134 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

a rather vague and sickly imagination 
that occupies itself with fantasy. They 
are easily recognized because even at their 
best they have a strong tendency toward 
the abnormal. They love to croon songs; 
above all they love the bodily sway of 
mystic dance. People of this type will 
dance alone; they will create and originate 
their dances if they are professional 
dancers. It seems hard for them to stay 
solidly on the earth as there is something 
of the bird in them. If fairies existed 
they would belong to that race — only they 
would be rather sophisticated fairies, with 
imaginations tending toward the mysteri- 
ous and the abnormal. They are not 
people who lead very open lives; and the 
lives they build up for themselves in 
imagination are often perilously close to 
madness. Perhaps instead of madness 
one might say genius, for to this type have 
belonged many of the strange poets like 
Paul Verlaine and Francis Thompson and 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 135 

many another who dipped his body in 
drugs in order that his winged soul might 
free itself from the contamination of 
earth. Edgar Allan Poe belonged to the 
Seven Type. Many great poets and also 
many great historic poisoners — for this is 
a strange type. In it you find Saints like 
Sister Theresa, poisoners like Madame de 
Brinvilliers, poets like Baudelaire; but 
always you find the unusual, the ex- 
ceptional, the inexplicable. The man or 
woman of this type is carrying a heavy 
burden, for it is hard for them to under- 
stand others or to make others understand 
them. Of course I have described the 
type in its most exaggerated form, but 
you will find hints of it, in a greater or 
less degree, in many of your acquaint- 
ances. 

TYPE EIGHT 
(Dynamic) 
Oh, Hey! She rises in memory — a 
dark, mysterious woman who seems to 



136 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

have been born in a veil. She is dressed 
in sombre garments; she looks at you with 
sombre eyes; and you know that within 
her silence and mystery there is a poten- 
tiality of fierce flight and wild outcry. 
She may do anything — this woman — and 
she usually does. Her husband walks 
narrowly with a wary eye cocked on her 
for he goes in fear of his days and nights. 
It is very hard to describe Type Eight, 
but I think you know it. The man also 
is quite a formidable person; he, too, is a 
stormy petrel with wild potentialities in 
him — potentialities of the highest and 
most spiritual devotion or of the fiercest 
descent into the pits of life. Remember 
these people are humanitarians, and the 
humanitarian unloosed is formidable and 
fearsome. They sweep the world with 
revolution; they light the fires of martyr- 
dom — even light those fires in the nursery 
sometimes and on the domestic hearth. 
Who can help admiring this tempestuous 



THE TYPES OF HUMANITY 137 

type? But it takes a bit of courage to 
marry it. 

TYPE NINE 
(Energetic) 
Soldiers belong to this type and all the 
strong, brave, energetic people of the 
world. They are rebels and pioneers — 
always in the advance-guard. They are 
intellectual, quick-tempered impatient 
of criticism, extravagant, and reckless of 
danger. For money they have small 
respect; and they spend it lavishly. In a 
world where alcohol is drunk they drink 
alcohol. In their formidable way they 
are aggressive, but they are strong and 
generous and always ready to repair an 
injustice. It is rather curious that this 
strong type occasionally becomes seized 
with a desire to heal those very bodies 
that it is their first instinct to hack to 
pieces in the way of war — for Type Nine 
embraces the warrior. In this case they 
make wonderful doctors and surgeons and 



138 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

nurses. There are women of this type — 
and likewise men — who have a most ex- 
traordinary and almost innate power of 
healing, who can rub your headache away 
with their firm, capable fingers. Remem- 
ber also that this soldier-healer type of 
person is just as liable to turn toward 
some strange mystic kind of religion as he 
is to take up the noble art of healing. 



CHAPTER IX 
Applying the Rules 

THIS chapter gives the rules which 
intelligently followed, according to 
the classification of your character and 
your definite type, will make for the 
maintenance of youth — showing you, in 
short, how to live and be young. 

You are, I take it, a grown woman — an 
adult man. Then by way of preliminary 
warning, I would bid you beware of 
gymnastics and methods of so-called 
scientific exercise. For two reasons: 

First: Physical education — like all 
other kinds of education — is for adole- 
scence and not for the adult. 

Second: Physical instructors, who are 
usually skilled enough in muscular move- 
ments, are entirely ignorant of what lies 

139 



140 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

behind the repetition of the physical 
movements they teach in their schools 
and gymnasia — or in their mail-order 
books. This ignorance of bio-physiology 
extends even to the laboratories, and 
there it becomes even more dangerous 
for it takes on an air of scientific authority 
and overawes the layman. 

As a matter of fact, even in the labora- 
tory little is known of the psycho-sensi- 
tive, psycho-metrical, and psycho-chemi- 
cal reactions of the human being, because 
all the experiments have been made with 
animals — and man is neither a rabbit, a 
dog, a guinea-pig, nor a frog; he differs 
wholly from the animal because his cere- 
bral reactions, instead of being simple, 
are multiple and proteiform. Therefore 
the laws laid down even by the scientific 
authorities in the matter of physical 
exercise are based on deadly ignorance. 
A muscular act is not merely a muscular 
act; that is only the visible manifesta- 



APPLYING THE RULES 141 

tion of it; what it is in reality is an in- 
finite series of causal combinations, hid- 
den and internal, of a psychological 
kind. And any form of "physical educa- 
tion' ' is liable to cause strain, fatigue, 
malady, either physical or psychic — and 
dig for you the grave of old age. Therefore : 

Do not take up any method of physical 
exercise unless your own personal physician 
bids you follow it. 

Do not experiment with your mus- 
cles—don't pull 'em about according to 
some silly book that accompanies the silly 
ropes and pullies in your bathroom. Re- 
member the adult needs, to be sure, 
physical exercise, but he does not need 
physical training and physical education 
— they belong to adolescence. 

Also: Even to-day, when few men are 
trying in any scientific way to live long 
and be young, a man's real force and real 
value are between fifty and sixty years 
of age, or seventy. 



142 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

A nation is worth only what its so-called 
old men are worth 

The physical organs: heart, lungs, 
brain, are the same at all ages; they do not 
need training — what they need is rational, 
pleasure-giving exercise. And you should 
exercise them precisely as you exercise 
your emotions and your mind — with 
profit to yourself and to others. A gymna- 
sium, an athletic school, is no place for a 
normal adult — unless he goes there to 
play; then it is all right. Indeed any 
exercise is right so long as it is the natural 
outcome of a physical desire. It is not a 
question of its difficulty. Scaling the 
Alps or hunting big game in Africa will 
keep a certain kind of man young. An- 
other will get all he needs by dancing at a 
pink tea. The thing to beware of is forced 
exercise — routine exercise, whether it be 
of the treadmill or the athletic club; and 
beware of it, especially when it has been 
ordered by a physical director. 



APPLYING THE RULES 143 



RULES AND EXERCISES APPLIED TO THE 
VARIOUS TYPES AND DEGREE OF TYPES, 
DESCRIBED IN CHAPTER VII AND CHAP- 
TER VIII FOR BOTH MEN AND WOMEN. 

Type One 

first degree: affirmative. 
The man of this type and degree 
should never retire from his 
business or profession; he should 
never give up public life — no 
matter what is the date of his 
birth. He should keep out in 
the open all he can by day; and 
not be a night-hawk. This type 
is active enough physically; it 
should not be urged to take 
exercise; it should be urged to 
lie down now and then during 
the day and take a rest. The 
things to be avoided are over- 
exercise and over-eating. The 
affirmative person of Type One 
derives emotional satisfaction 
from his work. All social life 
is good for him. There he finds 
his most helpful distractions— 



144 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

especially in the society of high- 
minded and intellectual people. 
This man — or woman — should 
play a part in public life. His 
mentality demands it. His 
ideals are always high: he has 
great organizing power and 
public influence. Unless he 
finds an outlet for his un- 
doubted ability, he will grow 
old before his time. 
He must never step off the 
scene of action; he must always 
keep going. The centre of this 
person's life is love — and he 
needs much of it from others. 
All he does is inspired by senti- 
ment, either for individuals or 
for humanity. 

He should read everything — 
poetry and fiction as well as 
books about governments and 
religions. 

Of course it is understood what 
has been said of the man of this 
type and degree of type — and 
all those to follow — applies to 
and is equally true of the 
woman. She, too, is a leader — 
and is led by her heart. 



APPLYING THE RULES 145 

Type One. 

second degree: receptive. 
This degree of Type One is very 
much like the one just described 
and all that has been said ap- 
plies to it. It is, however, more 
sentimental and emotional, 
therefore it needs cooperation, 
with strong friends and helpers; 
and with much encouragement 
it can achieve great things. 
Don't over-exercise. 
Don't over-eat. 
Don't play with fire. 
Live by day — you are not a 
night-hawk. 
Take a daily siesta. 
Don't fall in love too often. 
Don't slop over sentimentally. 
Don't accept other people's 
troubles. 

Keep going — but don't hurry. 
Your way to youthful longevity 
is on the sunny side of the 
street. 

Type One. 

third degree: passive. 

You are to be envied; you have 

all the high qualities of Type 



146 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

One, described above, but you 
do not have to transmute them 
into action. Be satisfied to 
know these beautiful qualities 
are within you. You can trans- 
mit them to others — radiating 
kindliness and inspiration all 
about you. Don't worry be- 
cause you are seemingly in- 
active; in reality, you are bene- 
ficent. Therefore don't strive. 
Keep quiet and stay young. 

Type Two. 

FIRST DEGREE: AFFIRMATIVE. 

As you have seen, this type is 
touched with fantasy and idle- 
ness. Even when Affirmative 
it is not extremely active. 
You shouldn't try to be active. 
Physically, you do not want 
violent kinds of exercise. Don't 
let others force you into ac- 
tivity. Try and hold your own 
against them in spite of the fact 
that yours is not the strongest 
will. Dear woman (of this 
type), you are the most charm- 
ing of mothers — though not an 
especially good one. You are 



APPLYING THE RULES 147 

capricious; you are fond of 
change and in order to keep 
your youth you must to a great 
extent indulge your caprices 
and have many changes in your 
life. 

(I hope they will all be innocent 
ones.) 

Man or woman alike, change 
is essential to this type — espe- 
cially to Affirmatives, change of 
residence, change of friends, 
change of occupation, exercise, 
amusements, and ideas will keep 
you young. You must change. 
Therefore physically, emotion- 
ally, and mentally — follow your 
bent. It will not lead you far 
astray. That is for you the 
road to youth. 
Fish and be young. 
Take ocean voyages, sea baths, 
boat rides. Mystic and religi- 
ous music and verse will stimu- 
late your emotional body. The 
water is your element. Live 
near it or on it — that for you is 
the road to youth, and remem- 
ber you are at your best at 
night. , 



148 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Type Two. 

second degree: receptive. 
Virtually the same as Class One 
of this type only a bit more sub- 
ject to suggestion. Equally 
fond of change, you would 
probably not have the energy 
to make the decision were you 
not influenced by others. If you 
remain without change you will 
become unhappy — discordant — 
out of harmony with your sur- 
roundings — in a word old. 
Therefore follow the suggestion. 
Try and get out of life as much 
variety as possible. Take also 
boat rides and ocean trips. 
Change — and stay young. 

Type Two. 

third degree: passive. 
You, too, will dream of change 
and variety, but probably your 
life will be rather static. You 
may travel far in your imagina- 
tion. Home — that is domestic 
complications — may tie you 
down. If you are not happy 
with one husband try and get 



APPLYING THE RULES 149 

up enough energy to take an- 
other. 

If you can't, travel around the 
world in your imagination — 
bon voyage — it will keep you 
young. (By the way, when you 
feel blue take a Turkish bath.) 

Type Three. 

first degree: affirmative. 
You, my dear man or woman of 
this degree and type, are dis- 
tinctively the sort of people who 
never know when they are old. 
Wise folk — that is half the bat- 
tle. Because you like Latin 
I will say here as Erasmus said 
to Thomas More, regarding 
youth: Crede ut habes et habes. 
You are an out-of-door person. 
You like to be out of doors 
especially if there are people 
to stare at you with admiration. 
You for the Country Club! 
Play golf. Play polo — keep 
horses — dance — you should lead 
the cotillion. Go to the thea- 
tre; go to musical comedies. 
Show up at first nights. Dis- 
play yourself. You are proud 



150 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

of your home and your family — 
display them. That is where 
you will get a youth-preserving 
emotional stimulus. When you 
give your mind an airing, study 
big, imposing books — the mas- 
terpieces of history, religion, 
philosophy; and tell people 
what you are reading. 
Do these things — they will keep 
you young in spite of the years, 
always bearing in mind you 
need exercise in the open, ample 
amusements, mental stimula- 
tion — and, in fact, a large, am- 
ple, and conspicuous life. Your 
feet won't carry you far, but 
your blood needs stirring up — 
so ride a horse. 

Type Three. 

second degree: receptive. 
Everything said above for the 
Affirmatives applies to you, 
who belong to this second or 
receptive degree of the type. 
You should follow precisely that 
way of life, though the chances 
are you will not do it unless 
there is someone to prod you 



APPLYING THE RULES 151 

on. You can do it, only you 
need urging. Get just as much 
of that open, royal kind of life 
as you can; but do not strain 
after it — don't force yourself, 
for that means discord and old 
age. 

Type Three, 
third degree: passive. 
You, too, like the kind of life 
allotted to this type and it is 
good for you; but the gods made 
you rather lacking in energy — 
or rather in initiative. How- 
ever, you will live and be young 
if you sit on the porch of the 
Country Club and watch the 
other fellow play golf — play 
polo — or dance on the waxed 
floor. You might even take a 
turn yourself with great ad- 
vantage if someone came along 
and insisted upon it. But all 
in all, you are a splendid on- 
looker for these particular 
things. You will probably not 
care to mount a Kentucky 
thoroughbred — though you like 
to see others ride. You prefer 



152 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

a padded motor-car and for you 
that is right; youth-giving vi- 
brations will come to you from 
watching all open-air sports 
rather than participating in 
them (unless you feel like it), 
especially in good company. 



Type Four. 

first degree: affirmative. 
Your physical body has a ten- 
dency to take on age; and you 
must keep young in spite of it. 
Angularity and gray hairs do 
not make old age. But you 
need limbering up. Your bones 
have a tendency to stiffen. I 
hope you have a garden — go 
out and work in it. Mulch 
your rose-bushes. Dig. You 
will enjoy it; and you'll get not 
only youth, but wealth out of 
the ground. And since you are 
intellectual you will get the 
most good out of it if you take 
an interest in the higher horti- 
cultural experiments. You need 
exercise; and your garden is the 
place to take it. Incidentally, 



APPLYING THE RULES 153 

while you are about it build a 
summer-house and do the work 
yourself. You need a hobby 
to keep you young — in fact, you 
need a stable of hobbies. You 
need to keep your emotions 
stirred up. Go in for antiques. 
Start a collection of old books, 
or old jewels, or old coins, or old 
masters. 

And keep yourself mentally 
young by studying (for you like 
study) what modern thinkers 
have to say about the old phi- 
losophers and the new meta- 
physics. This is your path to 
Ponce de Leon's spring. 

Type Four. 

second degree: receptive. 
Your path to youth is virtually 
that described above. I do 
not know whether you will fol- 
low it. Perhaps all I can do is 
to echo the advice given to the 
Receptive man who confronted 
the mountain: Oh, you can do 
it — of course you can. 
But will you? 



154 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Type Four. 

third degree: passive. 
You, like others of this type, 
will find youth in a garden. If 
you are a city-dweller go to 
the country, buy a large garden, 
hire a competent gardener, and 
watch him garden. The only 
exercise you need is to walk 
about your domain and in your 
wise way see how badly he has 
done his work, drink plenty 
of buttermilk, please do! 

Type Five. 

first degree: affirmative. 
You are the most active of per- 
sons — you are always spinning 
about. How are you to keep 
young? You already have the 
art of it. You love youth. 
To keep young you should sur- 
round yourself with young peo- 
ple — with young girls, or young 
men, as the case may be — with 
children (nice house-broken 
children) and go out as much as 
possible in youthful society. 
You need no rules for physical 



APPLYING THE RULES 155 

exercise. You are agile enough. 
There is quicksilver in your 
veins. What you need to in- 
dulge in, in order to keep young, 
is sleep. The longer you sleep 
the younger you'll grow. 
Eat discreetly and never, 
never when you are fatigued. 
Be a dainty feeder. 
Your emotional nature needs 
the stimulus of social gayeties, 
of music, of card-playing — 
especially for good stakes — and 
of all games in which there is 
fun and chance. Don't follow 
one line of interest — you have 
the quick intelligence that can 
do two things at the same time 
and do them well. You may 
write books — more probably 
plays, for you are a bit of a 
plotter. Anyway, you will get 
your intellectual pleasure — and 
youth — in the theatre and 
among people who are fond of 
the lighter arts. Or it may in- 
terest you to go in for science 
or politics. In the latter case, 
your natural gift for oratory 
will carry you far. You will 



156 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

keep young if you remember 
that your innate activity de- 
mands multiple outlets; always 
keep going. Make your home 
in a ballroom. 



Type Five. 

second degree: receptive. 
You are just a little less active 
than the first degree of this 
type. You will keep your youth 
by exerting less physical and 
more mental activity. Don't 
go running about ballrooms. 
Bring the ballroom to your own 
home. Fill your house with 
youth. 

When I say do not do these 
things I really mean do not do 
them unless you feel so dis- 
posed. It will be by exerting 
less and not more activity than 
those of the first degree that 
you will keep your youth — but 
sleep well also, eat discreetly, 
and guard against colds. (Don't 
get dyspepsia and don't wear 
a cold on your chest; stay 
young.) 



APPLYING THE RULES 157 

Type Five. 

third degree: passive. 
You will love all these social, 
intellectual, and artistic things, 
just as the others of Type Five 
do; but you will keep your 
youth by refraining from too 
active physical participation in 
them. Don't write plays — look 
at 'em. Don't write books — 
read 'em. What you can give 
is appreciation — and corking 
good advice, too, by the way. 
You will keep your youth by 
entering into the work of others 
of your type; but never hustle 
— stand aside, give advice, rest; 
and be young. 

(Don't try and ride a horse; 
take an aeroplane.) 

Type Six. 

first degree: affirmative, 
As you know this type is plea- 
sure-loving — given to ease and 
indolence and love of beautiful 
things. In order to maintain 
its youthfulness it should, as 
much as possible, indulge itself 



158 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

in the enjoyment of that beauty 
which is a joy forever. Whether 
you be man or woman or child, 
you need beautiful surround- 
ings. You should have downy 
beds — like the 'Young Visi- 
ters" — and tea in bed. All 
things soft and luxurious and 
colourful belong to you. Don't 
try and make your life hard. 
Your evenings should be given 
up to dancing with the one you 
love best — that particular eve- 
ning — and to a quiet hour in the 
supper-room. (But don't be a 
pig, please don't. If you don't 
stop eating sweets and choco- 
lates you'll get fat and no one 
will love you — and then you 
might as well get old and serve 
you jolly well right.) 
In order to stimulate your 
emotional nature (and keep it 
young) do not deny yourself a 
harmless flirtation now and 
then; but keep it harmless. 
When you make an appoint- 
ment with him (or her) let it be 
at an art-gallery, for pictures 
are for you real food for the 



APPLYING THE RULES 159 

emotions. All the season your 
social life will keep you busy; 
when the season ends go to 
Newport for the summer — or 
to Trouville — or to the Berk- 
shires — for the autumn, or 
wherever your particular smart 
set is going. 

You'll grow old unless you do. 
You need (and I am speaking 
quite seriously) just those vibra- 
tions of the clean earth and the 
fashionable sea and the smart 
mountains if you are to live 
long and be young. 

Type Six. 

second degree: receptive. 
I need not add very much by 
way of differentiating this de- 
gree from the more affirmative 
one: you must do the same 
things. Only, if you are a 
woman surround yourself with 
as many affirmative friends 
and admirers as you can; and 
they will stimulate you to fol- 
low the way of life I have out- 
lined above — and you will live 
and be young. 



160 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

But— 

Steady yourself; don't fall in 
love too easily — these adven- 
tures in love leave the scars of 
old age for one of this type 
and degree. The reason is, 
dear woman, you feel it more 
than others do. You know the 
old French saying: II y en tou- 
jours Vun qui baise et Vautre 
qui tend la joue — and you are 
the one who does the kissing, 
which, sooner or later, will 
wear you out and make you 
old (man or woman). 
For you there is only one way to 
youthfulness : moderation in 
love,in eating,drinking,in amuse- 
ments, in everything — even in 
getting married. Moderate your 
pleasure-loving nature and stay 
young. 

Type Six. 

third degree: passive. 
You will probably stay young 
anyway in your passive, un- 
perturbed way. People will love 
you because you have no 
nerves. Anyway, you are 



APPLYING THE RULES 161 

lovable. And your placidity 
makes for long life and eternal 
youth. Only — 
You should have a country- 
house with lawns and a rose- 
garden and many flowers — and 
that will be nice for your many 
many children and your host 
of friends. 

Music will keep you young, but 
don't bother to play yourself — 
have the butler turn on the 
pianola at twilight. 

Type Seven. 

first degree: affirmative. 
I fancy you are a genius; and I 
am sure you are misunderstood. 
Another generation may sing 
your songs or learn your poems 
by heart, but you are not at 
home, I fear, among your con- 
temporaries. You might be 
much more at home with the 
new race that is to be born on 
earth some day. 
Your idealism needs nutrition. 
How shall you find it? 
Physically, you belong to a 
frail type — to make you robust 



162 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

is impossible. Don't try to be 
a strong man — you will only 
shatter yourself to pieces. For 
your youth lies in the Ideal. All 
that normally feeds your im- 
agination — poetical harmonies 
and the music of stringed in- 
struments, starlight, and the 
mysticism of night. Quiet con- 
verse with a poetical soul, the 
rhythm of the dance, the secrets 
whispered to you by someone 
you love — will keep you young. 
Anything that startles the im- 
agination — even emotions of 
terror and fear — for you are so 
fine a soul that you can trans- 
mute these violent emotions 
into life-giving vibrations. Your 
soul needs strange things. 
You are poised just a trifle 
above the earth. You see fur- 
ther than other people see and 
I should be inclined to believe 
your prophetic dreams. 

Now to keep young do not 
worry about your physical 
body. If your feelings are all 
right and you keep the thought 
of youth in your mind, it will ^ 



APPLYING THE RULES 163 

take care of itself. If it had 
been intended you should be a 
runner for the Marathon stakes 
you would not have been given 
the kind of feet you've got. 
Don't strive for physical ex- 
ercises. 

Don't use your brain too much 
— it is too high-strung for rough 
mental work. 
Dream — and be young. 

Type Seven. 

second degree: receptive. 
You are like a harp-string — 
when a neighbouring harp- 
string sounds, your own music 
wakes and echoes it. Of all 
types and degrees — this is the 
most dangerous. 
The great danger is in sugges- 
tion — in becoming a sounding- 
board, in losing your personality 
in that of others. (Of course I 
am using an extravagant il- 
lustration; but the tendency is 
toward an undue lack of affir- 
mation; therefore ) 

Don't be too unselfish. 



164 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Don't mix in promiscuous 
crowds. 

Don't let people talk you out 
of your own opinions. You 
should have only a few well- 
chosen friends. You will live 
and be young by making for 
yourself a tranquil environ- 
ment and by gathering around 
you a few sympathetic, artistic, 
spiritually minded people whom 
you can love and trust. Above 
all, banish worry from your 
thoughts. 

If your physical body requires 
bucking up go to the seashore; 
play with the salt sea; and wan- 
der at night by the shore. You 
can live long and be young if 
you will live in the smart set, 
only your smart set is the 
smartest of all for it is made up 
of artistic people, creative, 
highly poetic, and spiritual — 
those people who are ripe for a 
higher civilization. 
But don't worry — please, please 
— Why worry? It is so much 
better to stay young. 



APPLYING THE RULES 165 

Type Seven. 

third degree: passive. 

I don't think you exist; if 
you do exist you are a fish and 
do not belong in this book — 
your proper place is a silver 
platter, with parsley and but- 
ter-sauce. 
But don't worry — stay young. 

Type Eight. 

first degree: affirmative. 

You are a strong type. Look 
back and see what was said of 
you in Chapter VIII. 
Now to preserve youth in one 
who has so many violent forces 
playing about in heart and 
mind is a trifle difficult, but it 
can be done. You mean so 
much to humanity, we can't 
afford to lose you under a hun- 
dred and forty years at least. 
Your forces should have a 
regular and steady outlet rather 
than the violently dynamic one 
you usually select for them. 
You will find youthfulness by 
following your bent, but only 



166 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

if you can do it with some 
degree of moderation. 
Don't explode. Explosions never 
kept any one young. 
Follow your bent if it leads 
you into public life — even if it 
leads you to start a revolution — 
but do it without an internal 
explosion. Blow up society 
if you have to, but do not blow 
yourself up. It will tend to 
make you old. In other words, 
try and get some order and 
system into your dynamic life, 
but do not fall into the error 
of attempting to repress your 
natural tendencies. Repression 
for you means old age. 
Don't exercise. 

Let your masseur — or your mas- 
seuse — exercise your body for 
you. 

Satisfy your emotions in public 
— speak in public and bathe 
your emotional body in ap- 
plause. As for your mind, it 
needs no stimulation — always 
it is over-stimulated. Avoid 
quarrels. 
In order to keep young, this 



APPLYING THE RULES 167 

type of the Affirmative Degree, 
must follow its impulses — al- 
ways — but the milder its ex- 
plosions are the longer it will 
last. Look for youth — dear 
man or dear woman — in the 
great cities; in the throngs of 
life. Go where the tide of life 
rises highest. Your smart set 
is humanity at its best. 

Type Eight. 

second degree: receptive. 
You would keep young, really, 
by founding a religion. I don't 
know whether you will do it or 
not for you lack, perhaps, ini- 
tiative. If you don't do that, 
remember you must in some way 
give your pent-up emotions an 
outlet. If you keep 'em in they 
will age you relentlessly. 

Physically you are all right 
and built for long-living; if 
there is anything wrong with 
you physically that is part of 
your mystery, for not even the 
best doctor can diagnose it. 
Don't force exercise on yourself. 
Dip your emotion in the crowd. 



168 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

Keep your mind young by 
teaching others — preaching to 
them out of your store of innate 
inspiration. You have original 
ideas. What you have to say 
is always new. 

By the way, you as much as 
any one else should have a box 
at the opera — a seat at the 
Symphony Orchestra concerts. 
Go far, go wide, go high — 
socially and mentally — and you 
will go on being young. 

Type Eight, 
third degree*. passive. 
You, I fancy, would be dynamic 
on a small scale — in your home 
or immediate environment. If 
you are a woman, tied down by 
an uncongenial husband and a 
child or two, you feel the yoke. 
It is hard for you to bear the 
yoke and still preserve your 
youth. Perhaps you can't break 
the bonds and get out into the 
world where your type should 
play a part. So— 
You must bring the world into 
your home, as much of it as you 



APPLYING THE RULES 169 

can get between the four walls; 
and you must bring the best — 
all that is best in your town or 
village. 

Man or woman it's the same 
thing. Adopt your village or 
your city. Make it your foun- 
tain of youth. Remember you 
are big. You are a force. You 
owe yourself to humanity. 
Start by adopting the com- 
munity near at hand and every 
man, woman, and child in it. 
If you let your interests go this 
way, you will keep your youth 
with you through the years. 
Don't bother about physical 
exercise or anything else. Be 
yourself in your own big way 
and you will keep young. 

Type Nine. 

first degree: affirmative. 
This is the most energetic degree 
of an energetic type. It thrives 
on wars and controversies and 
struggles — and to keep young 
it must throw itself into strife. 
If there isn't a war with Ger- 
many on, why, put up a fight 



170 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

with your neighbour — it will 
keep you young. 
Go hunting. Hunt big game. 
But be careful of your fire- 
arms and accidents to your 
head; and look out for malaria, 
typhoid, and swamp fevers. 
Travel — but travel for a pur- 
pose — to kill a tiger or build 
a pioneer railway. The fact 
is that your youthfulness needs 
much travel, large activities, 
many interests. 

Socially you are a conqueror, 
and in your social and public 
life you give out a great deal of 
magnetism which attracts peo- 
ple to you, but this very mag- 
netism you give out so lavishly 
calls forth from others high 
magnetic vibrations which will 
stimulate your emotional na- 
ture and keep it young. There- 
fore, you need to mingle with 
people and that will be easy, 
for you are everywhere a social 
favourite. Never do office or 
routine work of any description. 
That way old age lies. You 
will only get your youth from 



APPLYING THE RULES 171 

the vibrations of other people 
roused by your own magnetic 
quality. 

Mentally you should go in for 
practical problems — you are a 
great driving force. To keep 
young then, your slogan is: 
action — action — action — - 

Type Nine. 

second degree: receptive. 
The way for you to keep young 
is to do exactly as the Affirma- 
tive Degree of this type does, 
but you cannot I fear do it 
alone as he can; therefore look 
for collaborators and com- 
panions interested as you are in 
these big and active things. 
Marry, if you can, an affirmative 
person of this type. That will 
be a good combination — and 
will make a merry household. 
The surgeon or physician of this 
type is always at the head of his 
profession. He gives out an 
awful lot of sympathy and to 
keep young he should try and 
not be too good to others. 
In order to stimulate and keep 



172 LIVE AND BE YOUNG 

young the emotional nature this 
receptive degree of the type 
should keep in touch with suf- 
fering humanity. The neces- 
sary stimulus for the mind 
would probably be found in the 
literature that deals with the 
ills of the body or the more 
mysterious recesses of the soul. 
Youthfulness for these people is 
conditioned not only in action, 
but in research and in helpful 
sympathy with those who suf- 
fer. It is a fine type — that is 
why I want it to stay young; 
and it stays young so long as it 
sends its own vibrations and 
receives in return the life-giving 
vibrations of humanity. Do as 
you please. Contradict every- 
body. Don't obey any one — 
not even your wife. Fight and 
be young. 

Type Nine. 

third degree: passive. 
Do you belong here? I hope 
not. This passivist wants to 
fight but won't; wants to con- 
tradict his wife but don't; 



APPLYING THE RULES 173 

wants to shoot the burglar but 
don't dare pull the trigger; 
wants to be a devil of a fellow 
but can't; and the deuce of it 
that without making the slight- 
est effort he will go on living and 
being young in his passively 
pugnacious way. I do not think 
there is any special advice I 
can give him except: Boast, 
dear one, and be young; and 
he'll do that anyway. 



You have, I presume, looked through 
all these types and degrees of type in order 
to find yourself. If you have not found 
your type and sub-type — take this book 
to your dearest enemy and ask her where 
you belong. She knows. She'll tell you — 
perhaps. 

THE END 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



